Freelance: John Cena/Alison Brie 'Action Rom-Com' Lacks Rom, Com and Pulse

By Chris Knight

Rating: D

 When was the golden age of action-comedies? Was it the ’80s, which gave us such gems as Lethal Weapon and Beverly Hills Cop? The 2000s, with its Hot Fuzz, Tropic Thunder, and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang?

 Regardless, there is mounting evidence that we have entered the genre’s dark age, with such barrel-bottom-scraping fare as last year’s The Lost City (Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum), Uncharted (Mark Wahlberg and Tom Holland) and, if the trailers are anything to go by, the upcoming Argylle (Bryce Dallas Howard and Henry Cavill).

John Cena pops up in that one, and also stars this week in Freelance, opposite Alison Brie. He’s Mason Pettits, a former Special Forces type who was injured in the field and now suffers silently behind a desk as a lawyer. She’s Claire Wellington, a disgraced journalist (she didn’t corroborate her sources!) hoping to revive her career by landing an exclusive interview with a South American dictator.

 OK, I’m assuming South American. Juan Venegas (Juan Pablo Raba) speaks Spanish and is described as “the last pure autocrat in the Western hemisphere,” which narrows things down a bit.

A line about oil and natural gas resources suggests Venezuela. But the country is called “Paldonia,” which is made-up. I was finally able to figure it out when a TV briefly showed a map of the region. It’s Paraguay, relabeled. Apologies to Earth’s 59th largest nation and her seven million people. You’ve been annexed by Hollywood. Adding insult to injury, the movie was shot in Colombia.

 The fact that I had time to ponder all this during the film should be a warning: You may find yourself unmoved, uninterested, and ungripped by Freelance. Cena and Brie strike so few sparks, they could be making a PSA about preventing forest fires.

 In one strange scene, they each walk out of side-by-side outdoor shower stalls, catch sight of each other naked, quickly cover up their bits, and then just stand there awkwardly for a few minutes rather than, I don’t know, duck back into the stalls?

A little later Claire makes an out-of-nowhere pass at Mason who (whoops!) suddenly remembers he’s married to Alice Eve. (Who by the way deserves better casting than the wife-back-home.)

So, zero “rom” and very little “com.” The action sequences are perhaps the best parts of the film. Director Pierre Morel sure knows how to crash a helicopter! But there’s only so many times you can watch Cena shoot, fight or drive his way out of danger.

 And what a talky movie! Although perhaps that’s not surprising when you consider that the main credit of screenwriter Jacob Lentz is 1,023 episodes of Jimmy Kimmel Live! penned between 2003 and 2010.

But even here Freelance stumbles. There’s so much exposition from the likes of Christian Slater as Mason’s former comrade-in-arms, or Marton Csokas as a South African mercenary. And yet when Brie’s character up and kills a guy, and Mason wants to know where she learned to do that, her response is fewer than 10 words: “The throat thing? Thank my dad for that!” No further explanation.

Perhaps Cena was hoping that working with Morel would provide the kind of career boost that Liam Neeson got from Taken, the director’s sophomore feature, back in 2008. But lightning is hard to recreate, and Taken had the screenwriting talents of Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen, not a Jimmy Kimmel guy.

And say what you will about Taken, at least it had the guts to give its villains a recognizable nationality. (Did you know that Albania once launched a tourism campaign to prove to the world that they weren’t a country of killers and kidnappers?)

Cena’s character at one point complains of a country being “like a Tim Burton movie ... colourful but it’s creepy as f-ck.” Of course, he’s talking about Paldonia.

Freelance. Directed by Pierre Morel. Starring John Cena, Alison Brie, and Juan Pablo Raba. In theatres October 27.