Freelancers

Posted January 14, 2013 by Speed - 0 comments

Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson is busy getting his movie career off the ground and if there’s one thing that can help with that, it’s getting seen in movies with big other big names. Well-known actors alone, however, don’t make a great movie and that’s the case with Freelancers.

Malo (Jackson) and his two best friends used to be criminals who got a second chance and they use it to enlist in the police academy. Once graduated Malo gets the proposition to join the “special” unit lead by Captain Joey Sarcone, the partner of his deceased father, and as such earn tons of money by doing all kinds of shady stuff instead of fighting crime. Malo however finds out that Sarcone had something to do with his dad’s death and starts thinking of a plan to take revenge.

It sounds simple and it is. What Freelancers tries to achieve isn’t quite clear. It’s a bit like Training Day or The Departed but the script seems to be a cheese with huge holes in it and the movie is filled with just about every stereotype you can think of. De Niro and Whitaker act on auto-pilot and Jackson is all but credible. His Male supposedly gets torn between all kinds of choices (do I become a good cop? Do I take revenge? Do I choose for the love of my youth, or go for the pretty bargirl?) but mostly seems to make a point of not taking any and “taste” a bit of everything..

There were plenty of possibilities to make this movie good, though. The three friends get three completely different partners and this could have been deepened out to make for an interesting story. Or the makers could have looked for a clear moral to which Malo lives by. By no, what we get is a lead character that doesn’t know what he wants, changes goal each time something happens, and a story that clearly doesn’t know where it wants to go to.

Freelancers is a movie that wants to do a lot of things but in the end achieves nothing.

The DVD gets a reasonable transfer but isn’t spectacular. The black levels are perfect but the image is quite dark of nature and the contrast sometimes goes in overdrive, making background in daytime scenes get wiped out. Qua detail of the cast we can’t complain but from what we hear the Blu-ray is clearly better in quality. The sound puts forth the action scenes very well and all channels are used prominently while dialogues never have any issue.

How I spent my Summer Vacation 40 laid off at GPG, Kickstarter in jeopardy