Freelance (film): I like John Cena, but this just isn't very good

I've got a soft spot for John Cena even though as a wrestler I wasn't much of a fan of his character. I feel as though he has a lot of potential to be a good actor and the few serious roles that he has taken on such as his minor character in The Wall show that he does have some acting chops. Unfortunately, he seems to be frequently chosen for "big silly guy" roles rather than giving him something a bit more challenging that can get him outside of the usual "hey, I'm really big and tough, but also a sensitive guy" roles that he always seems to get.

For whatever reason, Hollywood tends to not use him for anything else normally and this is exactly what Freelance is. Had it not been for the fact that I really want him to do well, I probably would have turned this off before it was over. After I finished it (and it ends abruptly) I really felt as though I had wasted 90 minutes of my life.

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So the story here is that Mason Pettits (Cena) is an elite soldier whose army unit was ambushed while invading the fictional country of Paladonia to assassinate their President Juan Venegas. We see a lot of the opening sequences in first person so that they can describe a growing up Mason without needing to find extra actors to portray Cena at various stages in his life. I don't recall this being done in very many films and I thought it was actually a pretty creative way to save money and time because let's be honest here, it's probably pretty tough to find someone that is going to physically represent a gigantic person like Cena throughout his life.

After the ambush, Mason's spine and back is injured and he is released from the military to continue pursuing his career as a lawyer, which he is successful at, but really doesn't enjoy. He also doesn't have a great home life because he feels as though he "settled" for this life rather than it being what he actually wanted. This point is pushed home by his rather "average looking" wife and the fact that he drives around in a minivan, dropping his daughter off at school, and going to work with a look of constant disdain on his face.

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One day an old Army buddy, Sebastian Earle, who is played surprisingly by a very young and almost certainly has had a lot of work done on him Christian Slater, and is invited to his compound where Sebastian runs a private security contracting company that operates all over the world. Earle offers Cena a "puff piece" job where he will serve as private security for a reporter who is going to Paladonia to interview the very Presidente that he was meant to assassinate all those years ago. He has conflicts of interest of course because he harbors bad feelings towards the dictator and feels as though he is responsible for the death of his friends as well as ruining his own life. He initially refuses the offer but we always knew he was going to take it.

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When they meet Presidente Juan Venegas, Mason is surprised a bit by how charming and friendly he is, and appears to genuinely be a good person who really cares about his country. He is not the ruthless overlord that Mason had expected him to be and for the most part, the people, especially the people in the countryside, seem to genuinely like him.

Of course there would be no story here if the President's convoy wasn't ambushed and his own security detail completely taken out allowing for Mason to take charge as the sole protector of both of them.

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Inside of all of the action there is a story that I think was kind of important about how Mason's reasons for hating the President/Dictator were misguided and the ambush of his Army unit was actually an inside job perpetrated by his own country in order to attempt to destabilize the country of Paladonia. For me, I think that these sorts of things actually do happen around the world when certain richer countries are interested in the natural resources of poorer countries, so they do covert ops like the one Mason was involved in to attempt to steal the natural resources of those poorer countries.

In this film the "bad guys" are actually South Africans, exclusively white South Africans mind you, that are behind the attempted assassination of the Dictator in order to force the signing of mining rights for the natural resources of his country. I don't feel as though this particular spoiler really matters all that much because this movie is terrible and I don't think you should watch it anyway.

It is basically just the same sort of movie that we expect from action films repackaged and starring John Cena instead of Dwayne Johnson for once. There is absolutely nothing original in this film and while some of the action is good, it is clear that with their $40 million budget that they weren't really able to even do this very well.

It bombed at the box office and after an opening weekend of less than $1 million, they transitioned to streaming services very rapidly.

Perhaps this can be a message to the powers that be in the film-making world that the audience simply isn't interested in seeing the same films repackaged and re-released over and over again. I would like to think that the global audience is in a sort of revolt at the moment and that we are voting with our wallets.

Should I watch it?

I'm going to do something I rarely do and straight out say that "no" you should not see this. The message about the destabilization of poor countries by large and powerful nations is a good attribute of this movie, but that is basically where it all ends. The story is predictable, the characters are hokey, and the action, even though this is almost exclusively an action film, is average at best. The only reason why I didn't turn it off was because I wanted it to be better than it was and I was in bed, away from distractions like my phone. There isn't a great deal of good to be said about this movie and if I could go back in time I would have just closed my eyes and gotten an additional 90 minutes of sleep instead.

_{currently the only legal way of obtaining Freelance is on VUDU and Amazon Prime}