Freelance Featured, Reviews Film Threat
It’s currently showing in theaters. In director Pierre Morel’s action/comedy Freelance, John Cena takes down bad guys, shoots a bunch of guns, and grimaces in disgrace. Mason Pettitz (John Cena) is a former special forces member who embraces civilian life as a junior lawyer and lives a sad life with his wife Jenny (Alice Eve). They thought Mason was gone, but they kept pulling him back because former special forces leader Sebastian (Christian Slater) needed him for a quick mission. After some persuasion, Mason agrees to use his past life to work as a bodyguard for disgraced TV journalist Claire Wellington (Alison Brie). Claire Wellington gets a career-changing opportunity to interview Pardonian dictator Juan Venegas (Juan Pablo Raba). Incidentally, Venegas is responsible for the death of a former Mason member. Of course, Mason and Claire don’t get along at all. Claire doesn’t need the help of military thugs, and Mason can’t stand this self-righteous, recently “cancelled” reporter. Claire quickly becomes infatuated with the charismatic Venega, and on her way to his villa for an interview, a military coup occurs, forcing our trio to hide in the jungle to survive. The biggest problem with freelancing is that there’s nothing special about it. You’re looking for truly memorable moments.
The movie then goes into a twist mode where everything you were told in the first half of the movie is wrong and you have to believe completely different lies and false assumptions about various supporting characters. We are constantly asked to form an alliance against the dictator Venegas, but in the end we don’t care and every feeling we have for him ends up being imposed on us. Yes, if you like action, guns, death, and car chases, Freelance has plenty of it. Just like every other action film before it. If you’re going to make a movie like Freelance, you’ve got to find a single moment (preferably two or three) that stands out and is mind-blowingly different than any other film. It doesn’t happen, and ultimately, the story doesn’t take itself seriously enough for me to take it seriously. Let me be honest again. The ending is a bit of a mess, as if it was rushed to get it over with. One element of the ending I’m referring to is the relationship between Mason and his boss, Sebastian. In a typical action film, there’d be a bit of a conflict…a twist, as it were. I’d bet there was a different ending in the original script. Are we subverting expectations or prepping for a sequel and the return of Slater? Ultimately, Freelance is not special enough for me to care whether it lives on as a new franchise or lives on in my video collections. It just feels like a movie that was made because Cena and Brie agreed to star in it.