Subject: REVIEW: FREEJACK

From: [email-masked] (Ellen Sasse)
Date: Fri, 24 Jan 1992 18:57:28 GMT

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				  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