A movie so lazy it puts my housemate's cat to shame.
There’s a running joke among Star Wars fans about how Stormtroopers—the soldiers of the evil empire—have terrible aim. It’s one of those things that once you notice it, you can never un-notice it. It goes beyond Star Wars, though. Realising that the run-of-the-mill grunts in an action/adventure movie will never pose a serious threat to the main characters threatens to rob a story of its tension. Movies like John Wick solve this problem by having the hero barely scrape by, even in fights against faceless goons. That’s one end of the spectrum.
The other end is Freelance.
Suspension of disbelief is a tightrope walk. I get it. Some viewers will balk at the tiniest of continuity errors and some will scoff at how fast a character made it across Midtown Manhattan in a car during rush hour. Stuff like this doesn’t bother me, though. Call me a wide-eyed cinema baby, dazzled by the images moving on the screen, but it takes a lot to break my immersion in a movie.
It happened during the first action scene in Freelance. Former Army-dude Mason, played by John Cena, is in a shoot-out on a bridge. He’s defending journalist Claire Wellington and the President of the fictional South American nation he finds himself in. He’s surrounded on all sides, machine guns firing everywhere. Not only do the good guys survive, but they survive unharmed. I exhale slowly. It’s alright, I tell myself. It’s just one action scene. But then it happens again. And again. And again.
By this point I’d completely tuned out. I refuse to believe that a professional director doesn’t understand the concept of stakes in a movie. I refuse to believe that he’d never heard of tension. And while I can accept that understanding a concept and executing it are two completely different things, this is the director of Taken we’re talking about—perhaps one of the most well-known action movies of all time.
And so, I’m left with only one other option; the director didn’t care. He couldn’t seriously expect me to get emotionally involved with his movie if he goes so far out of his way to have the main characters remain unhurt by the coup happening around them that bad guys with machine guns are missing from mere feet away. It’s embarrassingly lazy. The action set-pieces are so bland and poorly conceived that I can’t help but wonder why the movie was written in the first place, because if it wasn’t for the action, it certainly wasn’t for the characters.
John Cena and Alison Brie are, thankfully, extremely competent actors. They manage to bring a level of gravity to their characters that isn’t necessarily in the script. Unfortunately, these characters are flawed—and not in the good way—from conception. They don’t play off each other well at all. Claire is trying to pull off the interview of a lifetime to save her dying career and Mason is reluctantly working as her bodyguard because he’s bored of civilian life… but also he doesn’t want to be there?
There are so many loose character threads here. We don’t ever find out precisely why Claire’s career tanked, or what being a journalist means to her. The movie spends a lot of time establishing that Mason is also a lawyer, but this never pays off even slightly. How did Claire—a disgraced journalist—snag this interview? Why does Mason hate civilian life so much? None of this explored. Neither of the characters ‘complete’ each other in the way that buddy movies like this so often do. The movie literally isn’t about anything.
Sure, there’s a convoluted plot involving a South African mercenary group working for… someone, I guess, we never find out… who want to kill the president and replace him with another guy so that… natural resources… corporate…interests… something… something. Listen, having a weak plot as an excuse to shoot some cool action scenes and character moments is fine. Fun, even. Just look at Die Hard. I’ve seen that movie more times than I can count, but I still can’t tell you what Hans Gruber actually wanted when he stormed Nakatomi Plaza. It doesn’t matter. The plot isn’t the point. Bruce Willis crawling through air ducts muttering ‘Come out to the coast, we’ll get together, have a few laughs’ is the point.
Putting aside discussions of a much better movie, I think it should be clear to you that Freelance is a waste of your time. I wanted to see it because John Cena is constantly surprising me, and Alison Brie will always have my undivided attention because I’ve seen all of Community three times, but this movie is a joke. Maybe—just maybe—you might be able to eke some enjoyment out of the occasional mildly humorous interactions between the leads, but I doubt you’d manage much more than exhaling sharply out of your nose.
I was surprised to find out that this movie actually had a theatrical run, but only in the States, I think. It was streaming on demand a mere month after its release. Netflix and its ilk catch a lot of flak for buying up the distribution rights to films and then letting them rot deep in the bowels of their algorithm, alone and forgotten. At least in the case of Freelance, it’s a fitting fate.
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