BootDigest Such a frustrating disappointment

Grimerlana Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

MamaGravity good back-story, and good acting

TrueHello Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Predrag It looks great, it's fast-paced, it has good actors, but it's a turkey. What went wrong? Firstly, one of those actors - Rene Russo - doesn't have her heart in it. And since she's the love interest, that kills the love story. There's been plenty of negative comment about Mick Jagger in this, but he's fine. It seems most people just can't get their heads around such a famous rock star being an actor. The major problem is the script, which probably had merit when written, but ended up after the rewrites making very little sense. You can watch this movie and enjoy the ride, but at the end you just ask yourself, "What the hell was that?".None of it makes much sense. Every scene has been designed as a photo opportunity to make the film's technicians look good on show reels - and they do. But the price paid is to alienate the audience from any identification or lasting enjoyment. So what's so great about this movie? Emilio Estevez. He carries this movie overall, and puts in a good performance. Sadly, his effort is not enough to keep this movie out of the $.99 cent bin. At the time Freejack came out, this cast was A-List. But even with Estevez putting In a solid job, and Jagger doing better than I expected, it could not offset the "phoning it in" performances from Russo and Hopkins. So in closing, it's no masterpiece. But, if you're wanting a throwback sci-fi that is fun to watch, here's your bet. Overall rating: 5 out of 10.

zardoz-13 Ostensibly, "Quiet Earth" Aussie director Geoff Murphy's fair time-travel thriller "Freejack" is based on Robert Sheckley's novel "Immortality, Inc.," but the two share little in common. In this derivative but entertaining cinematic adaptation by scenarists Steve "King Kong Lives" Pressfield, Ronald "Alien" Shusett, and Dan "Nightcrawler" Gilroy, our resourceful hero, young Formula One race car driver Alex Furlong (Emilio Estevez of "The Breakfast Club") finds himself mysteriously hijacked from the year 1991 to the year 2009 by the villains so that he can serve as the host body for a dying millionaire. The man supervising this ingenious body snatching via some laser lighted science fiction technology is a bonejacker named Vancendak (Mick Jagger of "Ned Kelly") who turns out to be less as villainous than we are lead to the believe. After Alex awakens to find himself in a weird sort of hospital, he realizes that the emergency room personnel have other things on their minds than restoring him to his pristine state of health. They want to lobotomize him but they blunder and get zapped themselves. Alex manages to escape, but the future is grimy and he is at odds trying to figure what to do next. Everybody who appears to be helping him is set out to betray him. The action focuses primarily on Alex's efforts to evade the tenacious Vacendak while trying to reconnect with his former flame, Julie Redlund (Rene Russo of "Lethal Weapon 3") who thought that she saw him die during an auto crash. Anthony Hopkins doesn't have a lot of screen time and you'll know why after you sit through this R-rated adventure yarn. "Blue Steel" lenser Amir Mokri photographs everything elegantly in the widescreen process, while Murphy stages the action with verve. Moreover, he has the good sense to keep the action moving at a fast pace. There are a sufficient number of surprises, but you know that nothing is going to thwart our hero once he latches back onto his girlfriend. Oddly enough, Julie doesn't appear to have aged a day in this actioneer. Aside from the bizarre looking futuristic technology, "Freejack" is a predictable but tolerable thriller.

MARIO GAUCI I recall this being released in theaters locally; actually, I’d forgotten it was helmed by Murphy (of which I owned but hadn’t yet watched the well-regarded THE QUIET EARTH [1985]) – but I now took care to remedy that. Incidentally, I rented FREEJACK solely on the strength of Mick Jagger’s appearance in it…having just watched him in SHINE A LIGHT (2008), Martin Scorsese’s rockumentary on The Rolling Stones!Anyway, while both of Murphy’s films are science-fiction, there’s really no comparison between them: THE QUIET EARTH is low-key, deliberately-paced, character-driven and thought-provoking, whereas FREEJACK is a fanciful, effects-laden roller-coaster ride (no prize for guessing which I found to be superior)! Interestingly, the latter’s plot line seems to have anticipated THE FUGITIVE (1993) – with Jagger’s character, doggedly in pursuit of bewildered (and bland) time-traveler hero Emilio Estevez (dubbed a “Freejack”), being swayed to the latter’s side by the end of it. Amusingly, the events depicted are supposed to occur next year…but one can’t help feeling that the grimy futuristic look – not to mention the unwieldy cars on display – imagined by the film-makers was a bit too earnestly pessimistic (at least, they got the idea of cloning right)! Nevertheless, we’re treated to the usual relentless bouts of expensive mayhem, mystifying (but entirely hokey) computer-generated wizardry, and all sorts of stereotyped characters (former friends turning traitors, Rene Russo as Estevez’s ex-girlfriend who mistrusts but then accepts his presence in her ‘new’ life, Anthony Hopkins as her employer – an apparently benign tycoon who’s ultimately exposed as the misguided power behind the conspiracy, his vicious underling who harbors notions of taking over from his ‘weak’ boss, etc.) – which renders the whole dreary yet predictable, at once insubstantial and overlong…

bkoganbing Though the plot of Freejack has been used over and over again in film, at least as far back as Boris Karloff's original The Mummy, it's told quite interestingly here with a lot of good special effects.Freejack did steal from an earlier film called Millennium that had starred Kris Kristofferson. In that one people from the future were snatching wholesale the persons who were in plane crashes a milli-second before impact killed them to replenish the gene pool.Here it's only one man, gazillionaire Anthony Hopkins who's company has perfected a kind of time travel. He's in some kind of cryogenic freeze, but his underlings can communicate with a holograph that his mind projects. He's looking for a young healthy specimen who's body he can take over, one before all kinds of disasters, natural and manmade have hit the planet.He's found one in Emilio Estevez as a race car driver who was killed in a crash in 1992. Like in Millennium, Estevez is snatched from the point of death and transported seventeen years into the future.. Only he proves to be quite the lively corpse and resents what's about to happen to him and escapes. Estevez's presence has also set off a power play in the company that involves the head of security, Mick Jagger, the Vice President Jonathan Banks, and Rene Russo who was Estevez's old girlfriend back in the day.Freejack has some nice special effects in it and good performances by all the principal players. In the supporting cast also look for good performances by David Johansen as Estevez's former agent, Amanda Plummer as a rifle toting nun, and Frankie Faison who's become a philosophical gourmet cook of rats.Science fiction fans will especially like Freejack.