Freejack is a 1992 action film about a race car driver who suffers a CATASTROPHIC accident, only to wake up in a world he’s never known.
One of the coolest things about watching old movies is seeing how far off they are in predicting the future, and the early 90s is home to a gold mine of titles for fans of such. Films like Sylvester Stallone‘s cartoonishly violent Demolition Man (1993) and Jean-Claude Van Damme‘s cleverly loopy TimeCop (1994) are just a few of the ‘best’ in the lot, movies that had a sense of humor about themselves while delivering plenty of future-y gadgets that surely at the time felt like just how life would be in the next century. Then there is Geoff Murphy‘s 1992 action sci-fi thriller Freejack, a future movie with easily one of the most intriguing ideas in the genre that on release was a colossal box office flop and a critically savaged bomb. Perhaps, deservedly so. However, as bad as much of the film is – and it’s all kinds of real bad – it’s because so that it remains endlessly watchable. Almost addictively so. It’s awesomely terrible.
THE STORY: It’s 1991 and we’re at the start of a Formula One race where young, cocky driver Alex Furlong (Emilio Estevez) is looking to chalk up another win, his beautiful young girlfriend Julie Redlund (Rene Russo) his biggest fan. Meanwhile, without explanation, and apparently at sometime in the night, we see oddly shaped vehicles and all sorts of strange devices being staged with heavily armed men at the ready, led by Victor Vacendak (Mick Jagger). Back on the racetrack, Alex is near the front of the pack but suddenly makes contact with the open wheels of the driver in front which it sends his car into the air where it smashes into an overpass in a huge ball of metal and fire. At that same moment, Victor and his men initiate their hi-tech device and –ZAP – transport him right out of his vehicle and into their own portable hospital van, saving his life. Seemingly.
However, things are not so good for Alex, as he quickly realizes the medical professionals surrounding him are not here to help him, and when the caravan is attacked with machine guns and rocket launchers, he’s really thrown for a loop, escaping into the night with Victor and his cronies right on his tail. But why?
Turns out, as he soon comes to learn, he’s not actually in 1991 anymore but in the future. 2009 to be precise, and he’s known as a ‘freejack’, a person who has been pulled from their moment of death to be used as vessels for the mega-rich where they insert their minds after they themselves pass, basically making them immortal. Now on the run, eighteen years from where he started, he sets off to find Julie and figure out who wants him, why, and how to stop it. Count on lots of car chases, snarky one-liners, and … Anthony Hopkins? Yup. Him, too.
WHAT TO LOOK FOR: So sure, this movie is bad. It’s not particularly well-directed. It’s not well-written. And it’s poorly acted and edited. All of that would seem enough reason to steer clear, but I’ll tell you why it’s still worth watching. The glorious cheese. This film is stuffed with it, so much so, it’s almost as if the filmmakers were trying to make a bad movie just for that sake. I’m pretty sure that’s a fact.
Take Estevez. He’s a good actor. He’s made some good movies. I’ve always liked his vulnerability and witty asides. But he’s no action star, despite his efforts in flicks like Young Guns. And because of that, there’s no way he should be the star of this movie. He’s not convincing as a race car driver and he’s not convincing as a man on the run. He can’t do fight scenes and he has no presence as a traditional or otherwise action hero. Seriously. At one point, he looks like this:
You see what I’m saying? He looks like a wimpy photojournalist who’s about to get squished by a giant monster. What’s more, we can’t exactly get behind the ‘everyman’ trope either since this guy drives around in single-seat, open-wheel Grand Prix races in cars that go 375 km/h (230 mph) for a living. He literally lives on the edge. My point, it ain’t working.
Then there’s Jaggar, who is spends nearly the entirety of the film atop a tomato red modified Cadillac-Gage Commando V-100 amphibious armored car sneering and staring, delivering lines with all the punch of, well, a legendary rock star trying to become an actor. It’s like watching loops of early video game live-action cutscenes. With no way to skip.
And there’s plenty more to get down on, especially the over-use of vehicular mayhem (cars spontaneously erupt in flames when they contact each other) and supremely corny dialogue. There’s a scene featuring the great Frankie Faison, credited as ‘Eagle Man’ who appropriately enough delivers a brain contorting speech about eagles and eagle babies that will most likely have you wondering if you accidently clicked the ‘awkward existentialism’ button on your remote control. It’s profoundly weird.
So it just seems that, and here’s the clincher, the filmmakers really took to embracing the goofiness and running with it … all the while without apparently ever telling their cast. How else can you explain an ending (minor spoiler) that features a mind melding device that essentially is a giant piece of a game of Jacks.
Look at that thing. This is a real screenshot from the actual movie and it’s significant to mention that throughout the entire duration of this extended sequence, no one ever mentions once that this mind melding machine looks exactly like a toy or, perhaps more importantly, breaks into snot-spraying laughter. Much like you will.
Then there are the cars. From 2009. That’s them above. I really don’t know what more can be said.
I get that in the 90s, the ‘future’ was already well-established in entertainment as a place of apocalyptic chaos. Countless movies have made it so, and thematically, it makes for a solid launching point for a story. In Freejack, the general population has fallen into sickness because of the depleted Ozone, leaving much of the cities in ruins where homelessness and poor living conditions have left most everyone looking like gun-toting extras in a Mad Max movie. The corrupt rich have made the gap wider and are now living with the possibility of immortality and taking advantage of the destitute. Admittedly, mostly, these elements are done well enough, if not overly-familiar, to work.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t leave much wiggle room for the characters and sets them on path so rutted by overuse that seeing where it’s going and who is to blame about as mysterious as a bowl of corn flakes. And yet, Freejack is remarkably watchable, it’s B-grade production (green screen shots are epically obvious) and comic book dialogue (the screenplay is by Ronald Shusett, notable for writing Alien) lend the whole thing a kind of bubblegum charm. You come to find a sort of comfort in the failed over-the-topness of it, where budgets limited scope and screenwriters abandoned second drafts.
More so, despite the giant jack at the end of the film, the finale is rather satisfying with an easy twist that is played out well considering everything before it. And while I would bet with a better cast and a less destructive mindset, a reboot of this movie would be something worth seeing, the psychological and philosophical implications much more exploratory than cars that go boom. Still, if you love 90s action schlock that got the future all wrong, you really need to get this under your belt. It’s an awful movie that is supremely fun to watch.