First and foremost, I’d like to apologize to my eyeballs for making them watch all one hour and forty-eight minutes of Freelance (2023). Were they more litigious, I’m sure they would sue me for all the damages they suffered from rolling so wildly that they nearly fell out of my head. Please forgive me, dear eyeballs. (Though I cannot promise to do better by you, as it’s my solemnly sworn duty to watch some schlock.) I mean, look, I did not go into this action-comedy about a retired special forces guy pulled back into the fray to provide personal protection to a somewhat washed-up reporter when she travels to the extremely made-up South American country of Paldonia for an exclusive interview with its charismatic, but stereotypically authoritarian president, expecting more than idle entertainment, but this movie really managed to spectacularly implode any hope of that from pretty much the outset by jettisoning the comedy, the action, and any kind of chemistry between its principal players. And that’s before we even get to the misogyny and the obvious stereotyping about South America. It’s a real grab bag of delights.
Mason Pettits’s (John Cena) life has not worked out the way he planned. He tried to avoid a life in the suburbs with “neighbors [he] probably didn’t want to know, a wife [he] probably didn’t want to know either, maybe an affair with [his] neighbor” by joining the Special Forces. And it worked for a while. He got to go on exciting missions and “help people” by assassinating other people. He felt like he belonged. Like he had a purpose. Like he was someone. Then, on a mission to Paldonia to assassinate President Juan Arturo Venegas (Juan Pablo Raba), his helicopter got shot down, many of his fellow soldiers were killed, he was injured, and his career in the forces came to an abrupt end. Back at home, he’s forced to work as a lawyer, which he hates, to support his wife, whom he seems to resent, and his daughter, who I guess he doesn’t resent yet because she’s still cute and he can teach her to punch little boys who try to kiss her in the throat. Oh, how I love a movie that sets it up from the start that a husband and wife despise each other based on nothing more than the fact that life isn’t exactly what they planned. Did you know that lawyers don’t have to live in the suburbs? Did you know they don’t have to practice one kind of law? Did you know that people can be dissatisfied with their life and work and still not hate their spouse for it? Apparently no one involved in making this movie did.
So, into this morass walks Mason’s old pal Sebastian Earle (Christian Slater), who now owns a private security firm called CDI, which Mason thinks stands for Chicks Dig It, but Sebastian says it really stands for Contracted Defense Initiatives, but that chicks do dig it. I suppose I should also be apologizing to my ear holes for this movie as well? Anyway, Sebastian wants Mason to do this one job, which he says will be super duper easy but will pay very well. Obviously, a huge lie. He just has to provide protection for Claire Wellington (Alison Brie), a once-respected reporter who fell from grace when she played fast and loose with the facts and now has been reduced to doing celebrity interviews. Still, she somehow has the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to interview Juan Arturo Venegas, that same president Mason blames for his career ending and his friends dying. At first Mason balks at the idea of doing anything to help this man, but Sebastian insists he just needs to “be some window dressing for her. Make sure she doesn’t get groped.” Excuse me? Get groped? Is that really his main vocation? I mean yes, powerful men do have a habit of groping, and I would certainly understand using this exact phrasing if she were meeting a specific former president, but I somehow doubt this phrasing would be used if she were meeting with most world leaders. So it makes me wonder if this script is just making broad stereotypes about certain parts of the world? Anyway, Mason agrees to go, and it’s perfect timing because his marriage is on the rocks.
Mason and Claire do not hit it off, but not really in a charming way. Just in an actually grating kind of way. She wants him to shut up and protect and he is frustrated by her unwillingness to listen to his opinions on Paldonia and the president. They land in Paldonia where they are met by President Venegas himself, and I have to say Juan Pablo Raba does appear to be having one heck of a good time in this movie as he swaggers around in his white suit with his ultra-white teeth and his perfectly coiffed hair. And I guess points to the movie for hiring actors who are native Spanish speakers, though that’s basically putting the bar on the floor. This is the beginning of a string of jokes like Venegas asking Mason if he wants to “ride my stallion” or making a pun out of Mason’s last name (because he’s just a big guy) or making slightly lascivious comments to Claire. You know, all things that rank slightly below middle school humor.
We are nearly half an hour into this action movie when something finally goes boom. The motorcade carrying Mason, Claire, and President Venegas is attacked while crossing a bridge, causing one of the SUVs to explode in a fireball. It’s only through Mason’s quick thinking and skills that the three of them escape sanos and salvos into the lush forest. There is much arguing about where they should go and if they should stick together, with Mason saying they should just call Sebastian for back up. Claire and Mason argue about whether it’s important to report on this, and Claire says that “we can’t just let another government in another poor country get overthrown in another coup and nobody pays attention.” Mason retorts that Venegas is a sociopath, which seems slightly beside the point about the entire country. Claire says that he seems okay and Mason insists that she read Hannah Arendt, which she says that she has. And I feel like this whole exchange, and most of the movie, is so that we know that Mason is smarter than we might generally give a beefy security guy like him credit for, but it just doesn’t land because it’s really at the expense of Claire and, to a large extent, everything else. Things go further to shit when a helicopter Mason thinks will rescue them starts instead to open fire and he must single-handedly shoot it from the sky. The helicopter budget for this movie must have been huge, and might possibly explain why other parts of it are so lacking. Eventually, they make a not-so-thrilling escape through the wilderness, where Mason dispatches with faceless men and Claire mostly shrieks and thrashes and Venegas turns out to own a really big gun (not a double entendre).
At this point the movie really could have done something if it opted for satire, but it doesn’t and so we’re left with a squelchy mess that has another full hour to play out. President Venegas takes Mason and Claire to what he says is his village, which is in the middle of the forest and where everyone is native and speaks Quechua, which I’m going to let slide on by because what politician doesn’t have some humble origin story that doesn’t quite make sense? There’s a scene where Mason, Claire, and President Venegas all end up seeing each other naked and Venegas makes a joke about Mason’s penis not being petite and it was all so cringe-worthy that I wanted the earth to swallow me up for them. Then, finally, we learn that Venegas is no longer willing to allow his presidency and country to be exploited by foreign governments and corporations in exchange for their natural resources. He’s taking back control of a new precious metal that’s been discovered in their country and only allowing its use to benefit his people, which means that the corporate bigwigs would very much like him dead as a doornail. This is a nice enough idea, and I’m all for calling out greedy corporations and shady governments for the evil they do, but I’m not quite sure where the movie ends up in terms of message in this case. Also, I don’t think it’s totally okay to make a silly caricature of a brutal dictator nor turn him into a hero of the people by one slight turn of his heel. Plus, the movie somewhat undermines itself when Venegas says things about how he’s bought off the resistance and allows them to blow up a bomb here and there and protest sometimes to let off some steam. He tells Mason that he should see the pool that the leader of the resistance has. So I guess everybody is somehow fucked up except for Mason, who really just wants to do what’s right and true and also always somehow knows exactly what that is? Thank goodness for American mans.
Anyway, because apparently they also needed an enemy foreign or domestic, against which Mason also has to fight, we also get to witness Claire suddenly coming on to him and him rejecting her because he’s still in love with the wife he’s spent so much time explaining he couldn’t stand. This scene was so confusing that I really couldn’t tell if Mason was supposed to be tempted by Claire’s offer of sex or disgusted by it. And honestly, it’s ridiculous that they needed to take the story in this direction at all. Can a man not realize his love for his wife without temptation in the form of another attractive woman? Claire and Venegas are actually the two that have more chemistry and things in common—a love of the spotlight, an interest in politics—so I don’t understand why they wouldn’t push those two into some kind of messy romantic entanglement.
Anytoots, the contractors who are trying to kill President Venegas keep showing up, and the unlikely trio keep having to race out ahead of them, with Mason taking charge, Venegas making things that approximate jokes, and Claire doing a lot of yelling. It’s not that yelling isn’t justified in this situation, it’s just that her character is largely reduced to a sexualized, attention-seeking, shrieking, fleeing joke. Eventually, after a whole raft of people have been mowed down, everything is going to work out just fine, because that’s how things work out in these movies. Mason will find himself again, so I guess the message is that unhappy, broken men just need a refresher course of bloodlust and paid mercenary work to help rekindle the old spark with their beloved? Claire will be taken seriously again as a journalist, which is nice since I don’t feel like the filmmakers took her particularly seriously, so it’s nice that someone in this fictional universe does. And Venegas rewrites the history of his country by calling for free and open elections and investing incredible amounts of money in education and infrastructure, which we all know is all it takes to fix a country hounded by years of corruption, greed, and external forces. But here is something positive that I did get out of this experience, and that’s the idea that if he isn’t already, John Cena might want to consider reading audiobooks, because his narration in the first few minutes of the movie was so soothing and velvety that I wanted to keep listening. I mean, I did not want keep listening to this overripe fish tripe, but to him reading something else? For sure.
Overall Rating on the Chronically Streaming Pain Scale:
Chronically Streaming 