The five best movies to watch on Netflix this weekend
Hello, fellow watcher! If spy movies on Netflix are your weak spot, stay away from this list, because once it gets its claws in, that weekend is done. Friday night starts with one film and, boom, half of Sunday has vanished, so pace yourselves, fellas, because this is an addictive list.
Mind you, cinema has been pulling this trick for donkey’s years. Dr No sent Bond swaggering onto screens in 1962, then The Bourne Identity arrived forty years later and gave the super-spy a rougher, bruisier makeover.
Once the mission goes off the books and the people giving the orders start looking dodgy, well, who are you supposed to trust then… The enemy in front of you or the boss who may be hiding half the story?
Netflix has enough of these films to turn one bad mission into a whole weekend, so if this is your weakness, go on, see how many of these five make it to Sunday.
The five best movies to watch on Netflix this weekend
The Gray Man (Anthony Russo, Joe Russo, 2022)
Do you like those spy movies where somebody finds out too much, and every person with an earpiece wants them dead? Then The Gray Man is your best option. Yeah, it’s like the film practically lives in that zone. Court Gentry, aka Sierra Six, starts out as a convicted killer recruited into a CIA assassination programme and then gets hold of evidence the agency wants buried. Just like that, he is on the run while Lloyd Hansen, a private mercenary, comes after him across Europe.
The Russo brothers made this Netflix movie after Avengers: Endgame, and the movie comes from Mark Greaney’s 2009 novel, which went on to kick off a whole series. And get this: Greaney created Gentry for an unpublished manuscript before reworking him for the book, so Sierra Six had been waiting in the wings long before readers met him.
Salt (Phillip Noyce, 2010)
Imagine finding out that a Russian defector has just told the CIA that you are one of their sleeper agents. That is where Evelyn Salt ends up, and once that accusation becomes known, the room changes fast because now the people she works with are looking at her like they have never met her before. Salt runs, which does not help her case one bit, and from there the movie keeps playing with the same question: is she being framed, or has everyone missed something sitting right in front of them?
Here is the part that still catches people off guard: Salt was written for a man, with Tom Cruise approached before the role was reworked for Angelina Jolie. Jolie took on much of the stunt work too, including parts of the motorway sequence, which made the action sequences look a hell of a lot more realistic. The Gray Man sends its spy across Europe, while Salt keeps its suspicion limited to one person.
American Assassin (Michael Cuesta, 2017)
Getting into black ops is not some show-up-on-Monday gig, and American Assassin makes sure Mitch Rapp earns every bruise. His fiancée is killed in a terrorist attack, so he makes revenge the mission of his life. He trains to infiltrate the network behind it until the CIA spots what he is doing and pulls him into its programme under Stan Hurley. Talk about the overnight career change, ha!
Hurley is not handing out gold stars. He puts Rapp through brutal training and sends him into the field when stolen nuclear material falls into the wrong hands and a rogue former operative enters the picture. So yeah, that revenge mission has become a full-on national security nightmare. Rapp has an attack to stop before people pay the price. The movie comes from Vince Flynn’s novel, an origin story written after Rapp had appeared in earlier books.
Olympus Has Fallen (Antoine Fuqua, 2013)
The White House is meant to be one of the safest places on Earth, so of course Olympus Has Fallen looks at that setup and decides to trash it. Mike Banning, played by Gerard Butler, is a Secret Service agent moved off presidential protection after a crash kills the First Lady, but when attackers storm the White House and take President Benjamin Asher hostage, guess who is stuck inside? Yep, Banning, and now the guy who got pushed aside is the one person who might get everyone out alive.
Antoine Fuqua directed the film and worked with Secret Service personnel to shape the attack, which helps the whole takeover feel less like random movie nonsense. Fun fact: 2013 also gave us White House Down, because one White House siege Netflix movie was not enough that year.
Heart of Stone (Tom Harper, 2023)
By the time Heart of Stone turns up, the spy game has moved on a bit, because the big prize is not a suitcase full of cash. It is the Heart, an AI system that can chew through mountains of data and predict what might happen next. Sounds handy, right? Well… until everybody wants it. Gal Gadot plays Rachel Stone, an MI6 operative who is also working for the Charter, and when hacker Keya Dhawan gets mixed up in the mission, bang, the whole operation starts coming apart at the seams.
Things kick off when Keya Dhawan gets pulled into the fight over the Heart, forcing Stone to blow her cover and keep it out of the wrong hands. From there, whoosh, it is across borders, and Stone has to work out who is playing whom. The nice twist? Old-school spycraft meets data-driven espionage, where one stolen algorithm can be as dangerous as any bomb.