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Written by Scott Meadow
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Wednesday, 14 January 2004 (read 1869 times) |
I'll admit to being a big fan of cyberpunk literature and film. I
admire pioneers like William Gibson and Walter Williams who pushed
science fiction to become socially relevant again after much neglect.
I also admire far looking directors like Spielberg (Minority
Report), Luc Besson (Fifth Element) and
James Cameron (Strange Days,
Terminator, Aliens), who all
immersed us in their original and inspired visions of a realistic
near-future dominated by political and commercial interests clashing
sometimes violently with culture. So you can imagine my complete
disappointment with Freejack.
Value:
$1.00 | | Our rating system is based on a $7 ticket cost and is the most you should pay to see it. |
It's the early nineties and an oddly
rebellious race driver named Alex Furlong (Emilio Estevez) is killed in
an accident while his girlfriend Julie (Rene Russo) watches.
Normally, you might expect this is the end of the story but...AH HA,
not so fast, because in the future mankind has perfected the art of
time travel, at least to the point of being able to snatch bodies from
the past and import them into 2009. Why have they developed this
bizarre version of Wells' time machine? To support the needs of
the future elite, of course, is the answer from writer Robert Sheckley,
on whose 1958 novel (Immortality, Inc.)
Freejack was based.
See in the future, the rich and powerful can purchase freshly killed
bodies from the past and then magically inject their own
consciousness/memories into them, ala a sort-of latter-day
Frankenstein. Meanwhile their minds are
downloaded into a huge, very strangely conceived computer system which
Freejack sticks at the top of a large skyscraper
for some impractical reason, and then spends the rest of the movie
making trite religious allusions about it (it's called the "spiritual
switchboard", etc. etc.) to keep you "thinking." In the end,
you've basically got a cyberpunk-high-tech-Frankenstein kind of story
running alongside a crypto-sociological commentary on the evils of
power and greed, and they crash together making a none too pretty mess
all over perfectly good celluloid.
Causality and virtually all the standard time-travel paradoxes are
helpfully avoided in Freejack, allowing you to
concentrate fully on the performances of a smart-ass, perplexed Estevez
and his nemesis in this adventure, a weird, stoic hunter called
Vacendak played by none other than Mick Jagger, for reasons I can't
imagine. We may not care about the time-space continuum, but we
sure do care about car chases, railing-deaths and lots of bullets
flying all over the place, none of which, unfortunately comes close to
replacing the weak plotline or Estevez/Jagger's flatlined center stage
performances.
Overall, Freejack does have enough things going
for it to warrant a watch, when your entertainment options are severely
limited. There is Anthony Hopkins (Ian McCandless) for instance, who
very capably plays the head of the world's largest corporation in 2009
and delivers the movie's only comprehensible performance. His
character's a power-mad corporate caricature, but Hopkins still has
more screen presence than the rest of the cast combined. There is
also a 1992 vision of 2009, which is good for a few laughs, especially
the stock "hooded cars" which are going to protect us, apparently, from
all the UV rays thanks to the vanished ozone layer.
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