Subject: REVIEW: FREEJACK

From: [email-masked] (Mark R. Leeper)
Date: 28 Jan 92 16:02:24 GMT

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				   FREEJACK
		       A film review by Mark R. Leeper
			Copyright 1992 Mark R. Leeper

	  Capsule review:  JACKASS is more like it.  Violent,
     ugly, stupid, and boring sci-fi chase film, purported based
     on Robert Sheckley's IMMORTALITY, INC., though actually
     borrowing just an idea or two.  FREEJACK exemplifies
     everything that is going wrong with current big-budget
     science fiction films.  Rating: low -2 (-4 to +4).

     Robert Sheckley, already known for short stories in 1958 when he
published his first novel.  IMMORTALITY, INC. had a science fiction
style but was actually a fantasy story based on the idea that in some
cases the soul does survive when a  person dies and that souls can be
transplanted to new bodies.  In the novel Thomas Blaine crashes his car
on the New Jersey Turnpike late one night in the year 1958 and finds his
soul transplanted into an unfamiliar body in the year 2110.  If all this
sounds familiar, you did *not* get it from seeing the new supposed film
version FREEJACK.  In fact, there is only an idea or two that Freejack
may have borrowed from IMMORTALITY, INC. and a few more borrowed,
uncredited, from John Varley's MILLENNIUM (or perhaps the film version
of that story).  But, okay, so FREEJACK is not a good adaptation.  Is it
at least a good movie?  And the answer is "No, FREEJACK is a *terrible*
movie."  Cut off about ten minutes at each end and the film is one long
chase story set on a futuristic background that makes no sense for any
year as near as its 2009.

     Emelio Estevez plays Alex Furlong, a race car driver who is plucked
from a fiery crash and thrown into the super-violent and incredibly
run-down world of 2009.  It seems that there is a huge corporation that
wants Furlong's body.  His mind they have no use for.  And for about the
next ninety minutes you won't need your mind either.  Of course, there
is something of a mystery going on in this future world.  But it is the
sort of mystery intended to give the audience the cheap thrill of
saying, "Aha!  I knew it all along!"  If you are surprised at who is
pulling all the strings, perhaps you deserve this film.

     The set direction at best looks like a cheap-jack version of
BLADERUNNER, and at times looks as if they had just filmed in any slum
they could find.  This view of the world eighteen years hence is neither
original nor imaginative.  BLADERUNNER's art director would look at
every object in a scene and redesign just enough to give you the feeling
time had passed.  The parking meters would be completely redesigned, for
example.  The closer you looked, the more interesting detail you saw.
Not so here.  There is no quality in the set design.  The equivalent
here is redesigning a delivery truck to make a product placement more
evident.  Most of the cars of the future look either like cars of the
1980s, cars of the 1980s with big fiberglass shells over them to
disguise them.  One of my pet peeves is a script that makes calendar
mistakes.  (There is a number trick for figuring what days dates fall
on.)  And any almanac should have told a scriptwriter who cared that
November 23, 2009, falls on a Monday, not a Thursday.  In another scene
we meet what is apparently a homeless man who must eat river rat.  It
would not be a bad little detail but for the fact that inside the grungy
clothing he has a neatly trimmed beard and smooth, shaved cheeks.

     Casting is another place where the film falls flat.  Emelio
Estevez, who has not had a decent film since THE BREAKFAST CLUB, just
looks too young and does not have the acting power for this role.  Mick
Jagger plays Vacendak, a hired killer and the head of a private security
army.  There is absolutely nothing about him that adds anything to
Vacendak that was not in the script.  The best that can be said is that
he does not detract from the role.  We might expect that, since Jagger
has little acting experience.  But what is surprising is that Anthony
Hopkins apparently chose just to act his role as a corporate executive
and to put nothing extra in it.  Either director Geoff Murphy did not
let Hopkins do much or Hopkins was just simply uninspired.

     Overall, we have a film with no characters and no core.  In their
place we have chases and gunfights.  The producers didn't even have the
sense to borrow what was good about the novel it claims to be based on.
I give FREEJACK a low -2 on the -4 to +4 scale.

     (The novel has been published as IMMORTALITY, INC. and earlier in
a shorter form as IMMORTALITY DELIVERED.  It was serialized in GALAXY
magazine October 1958 to February 1959 under the title TIME KILLER.  It
is currently available in a movie tie-in edition as FREEJACK, though the
novel itself has no reference to the term "freejack" nor to jacks of any
kind.)

					Mark R. Leeper
					att!mtgzy!leeper
					[email-masked]