A BIG BOLD BEAUTIFUL JOURNEY

Here's the honest tension. This is a genuinely appealing movie in places — funny, dramatic, sad, winsome, and tender by turns. Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie make a charming pair, and a few sequences land beautifully: David reliving his high school musical, Sara spending one more evening with her late mother.

But the good moments come wrapped in problems that can't be waved away. The dialogue is peppered with a heavy stream of "f" words — gratuitous, annoying, and constant — plus profanity that drags in the name of Jesus Christ. And the whole premise floats in a mystical, non-Christian atmosphere, with a mysterious car rental agency and a GPS "soulmate finder" standing in for anything like God.

So this one doesn't reach the bar. The performances are worth admiring in the abstract, but the language and the worldview make it unacceptable for the reader we serve. Our answer is simple: skip it.

David is driving to a friend's wedding when a strange rental car — signed up for in a shadowy warehouse — offers him something odd through its GPS: "a big bold beautiful journey." He hesitates, then says yes.

At the wedding he meets Sara, a beautiful blonde who both intrigues him and warns him off. But the next day their paths cross again, and the car's mysterious female voice begins steering the two strangers through actual doorways into their own pasts. Whether this new romance can ever take root is the question the journey keeps circling.

Three stars, and they're earned by feeling and performance. The film moves fluidly between comedy and grief, and its best sequences genuinely sing — literally, in the case of David's high school musical, where Sara joins him onstage and the two exit singing one of the show's iconic numbers. The scene of Sara spending a night with her mother is the movie's most touching, and Farrell and Robbie are appealing throughout.

What holds it back, even on its own terms, is tone. The movie needs more of those joyful moments and fewer of its darker detours; the balance tips too often toward the melancholy. A little more of the high-school-play buoyancy would have made a good film better. As it stands, the craft is real but the mood is uneven.

This is a mystical romance, and its spiritual center is not God but a machine. Two strangers are brought together by a strange, otherworldly car rental agency and a GPS voice that opens doorways into their pasts — and a joke near the end likens the agency to a soulmate-finding service. That's the film's real theology: destiny dispensed by a mysterious power, with no reference to the Lord who actually orders our steps.

The film also leaves God out of its account of love. It never nods to the biblical picture of marriage — a man leaving his parents to be joined to his wife. It implies David and Sara are simply "meant to be," then undercuts even that with a late revelation. Romance is exalted; covenant is absent.

And yet the movie isn't empty. It honors a couple of tender parent-child relationships, and it commends the courage to risk love and commitment — instincts that echo something true, even when the frame around them is pagan.

The film's deepest ache is for a love that's meant to be, for a home in someone else. Scripture answers that longing not with a magic GPS but with a faithful God: "He who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favor from the LORD" (Proverbs 18:22).

There's real charm here — two likable stars, a few scenes that genuinely move you. But a flood of "f" words, profanity that misuses the name of Christ, and a worldview that swaps God for a mystical GPS put it beyond what we can recommend. So our answer stands: skip it. Looking for something warmer for the whole family? Try our latest family-friendly picks.