Freejack has a strong pedigree behind it promising an equally strong science fiction action film. It reunited director Geoff Murphy and star Emilio Estevez from their 1990 hit Young Guns II, which was a vast improvement over the first film in that short lived series. On top of that you had top drawer talent like Rene Russo, Anthony Hopkins, dependable bad guy Jonathan Banks and oddball Amanda Plummer and factor in a co-writing credit for Ronald Shusett who was coming off the back of Total Recall, a film which Freejack is obviously heavily inspired by.
Despite all of the above the film is a mess. Geoff Murphy's direction, once so confident in the western genre, falls to pieces in the sci-fi arena. The look of the future world that Estevez is transported to (2009!) doesn't gel as a believably designed society, the action is glossy but boring, the script is dire and without the fun of Total Recall, and the tedious chase plot is burdened by a central mystery that's obvious from the start.
However, the biggest, most epic fail of Freejack goes to it's stunt casting of rock megastar Mick Jagger as baddie Vacendak. He's terrible with it being particularly obvious that he knows bugger all about acting. Given his prominence in the film it's a massive flaw that drags the already struggling production to its knees and in retrospect Jagger must have known this having never acted again. In some ways you've got to feel sorry for champion thespian Anthony Hopkins. Not only did he have to costar with Jagger's bottle of the barrel antics in this but he had to costar with Keanu Reeves in Bram Stokers Dracula the very same year. Now that is some real bad luck.
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