AaronCapenBanner
Geoff Murphy directed this science fiction story starring Emilio Estevez as race car driver Alex Furlong, who is snatched away from certain death in an auto accident from 1991 by technicians from the "future" of 2009, which is a bleak dystopia world where his mind is to be eliminated, and a rich businessman(McCandless, played by Anthony Hopkins) will have his mind transferred into Alex's body, but he escapes, and goes on the run, becoming a wanted man hunted by a determined bounty hunter(played by Mick Jagger) as Alex tries desperately to get out of this bad situation... Mostly inane film has a lot of energy but little plausibility, and now looks foolish and dated.
classicsoncall
Usually these types of time travel stories wind up giving me a headache, but this one was pretty straightforward (no pun intended). The protagonist, Alex Furlong (Emilio Estevez) is transported into the future..., and stays there. No attempt to get back to his former 'present time'; no fooling around with time lines that might affect the history of mankind. What made the picture interesting watching it today was that Alex was 'sent' eighteen years into the future from 1991 to - 2009! That was sort of cool - but in the movie's 2009, the country was already in the tenth year of a major depression instead of the first, like many today would have us believe. And it brought a chuckle to imagine if the ten million dollar bounty on Freejack Alex might have been offered by a company using bailout funds. Just thinking outside the movie box.I got a kick out of that scene in the bar when Alex is threatened by the marmaduke looking moron with his weapon, and Alex puts his on the counter with that sly Billy the Kid grin he used in "Young Guns".The attraction back in the day of course was Mick Jagger headlining a theatrical release. His performance wasn't all that bad, even if over the top a few times, which the director might have actually called for. I liked that 'One Mississippi' bit, and the idea that he had a sense of fair play in balancing his job with consideration for Furlong's catching him a break in the alley.The best concept though was the 'spiritual switchboard' - don't you think we could all use one of those?
Gavin McCall
This is a great film for film's sake and the fact that it is a good take your-girl-to-the-movies film but falls short of being as epic or as special as something like Bladerunner, which is still played in the theaters today, alas, therefore you'll be watching this with your girl at home and not in the theaters.The movie generally keeps you stimulated from the beginning through the rest of the film and you get interesting glimpses at what 2009 is perceived to be like. I wonder if the makers of Freejack knew that 2009 isn't as crazy as they thought it would be.Still the concepts in this movie are fresh and sci-fi, down to traveling back in time, replacing your about-to-be-killed corpse with a clone with the intention of kicking your supposed-to-be-dead soul out of your body and replacing it with a high paying client's well-to-do spirit, among other things! I give this movie a 7 because I would normally give a movie like this a 5 or 6 but they get an extra point for the increase in entertainment value by virtue of the neat sci-fi.Warning: Mick Jagger is in this movie. :p
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.
AD
