FREEJACK
A film review by Ellen Sasse
Copyright 1992 Ellen Sasse
FREEJACK is one of the better movies I have seen in a long time! It's no WAGES OF FEAR but it's good fun, and I would take it over HOOK, Costner's ROBIN HOOD, TOTAL RECALL, or similar fare any day.
It is well-written, well-acted, and it is good science fiction for a non-cult-movie. (Mick Jagger was bad in his first or second scene with dialogue but was good after that.) Emilio Estevez brought a surprising depth and warmth to the character, and the love interest actually didn't stand in a room screaming in a crisis. It was fleshed out with some interesting minor players too, among them a "sleazy agent" friend played by David Johanson [sp?], an ambitious corporate henchman, a Fisher-King-esque street person, and, of course, Hopkins as possibly the most powerful man in New York.
Fortunately this is not the standard western-masquerading-as-sci-fi with standard bimbo and standard bad guys. The dialogue was great, and gave the audience quite a few good laughs. (This is very rare in Media PA where I saw it; audiences here usually are quiet.) It also made some interesting speculations about the future; among them that in the next twenty years there would be the haves and the have-nots, and no more "middle class," that people were unhealthier overall and were always sick, and that even nuns carried guns. (That reminds me, the woman who was in THE FISHER KING as Robin Williams' love interest plays a slightly unconventional image of a nun which I found funny.)
This could spawn as many "goof" posts as your choice of Terminator movies if you take it too seriously, but the strength was in the characters and plot where it counts. *However*, I would recommend against this movie if you are the kind of person who likes your science fiction strictly accurate. If you couldn't live your life until you knew whether TOTAL RECALL was "real" or "dream," especially if you decided it was real and complained about how ignorant the authors were about physics, then FREEJACK is not your movie. If you are looking for a fresh action movie with some science fiction and humanity thrown in, see FREEJACK.
-Ellen
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