Freelancers Blu-ray Review
You mean like Robert De Niro and Forest Whitaker?
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, August 20, 2012
Even the greatest actors need to eat, pay the bills, and maybe stash a little moolah away for a rainy day, right? But in
the case of Robert De Niro, some more cynical types might be wondering if he simply accepts whatever offers come
along as long as the paycheck is significant enough. How else to explain the rather mind boggling array of less than
stellar properties the actor has consigned himself to over the past several years? Now comes
Freelancers, a
film produced by and starring Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson that is a collection of largely nonsensical clichés in search of
something—anything—memorable. The film was evidently released theatrically in a very limited run a couple of weeks
ago before its almost immediate dump to the home video market. Now, truth be told it's not the worst film ever made in
the "hard bitten cops on the take" idiom, and De Niro is fine, if unremarkable, as the elder policeman riding herd over a
coterie of younger thug-cops in training. But there's nothing in
Freelancers that most viewers won't have seen
in any number of other properties. We have the trio of street kid buddies who are rather mysteriously paroled from a
crime spree and then without a word of explanation are pretty much immediately shown as rookie cops. We have a
New York police force rife with corruption, with everything from drug deals (and rampant drug use), to racism and a kind
of
laissez faire attitude toward a number of criminals whose villainy plays into the cops' own underhanded
dealings. And we get a thumping rap score (provided by erstwhile jazz great Stanley Clarke), replete with a "50 Cent"
theme song, along with a slew of gritty shots of the urban minefield that is Manhattan and the surrounding boroughs.
Aside from the participation of 50 Cent and De Niro, the film rather improbably includes Forest Whitaker (as the cocaine
addled cop training Jackson) and Dana Delany (as a never very well defined character whose late husband helped the
three young street toughs matriculate to the police force).
Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson's early career was fostered by none other than Eminem, and Jackson seems to want to follow
in
the footsteps of several rap superstars by establishing his
bona fides as a "serious actor". In
Freelancers,
that includes some supposedly introspective hemming and hawing when, for example, he can't quite make up his mind
about really committing to his girlfriend or, later in the film, deciding between shooting her and his former best buddy
when he's given a no win option by a criminal mastermind he's attempting to ingratiate himself with. For a film
supposedly
built up around its stars decent if modest acting charms,
Freelancers doesn't really provide 50 Cent with a
whole
lot to do, at least insofar as moments that will set him apart from any number of former street toughs who matriculated
first to music and then to film.
Probably the most shocking thing about the film is its really smarmy portrayal of just about every element of New York
City's finest, where the so-called Thin Blue Line might in fact be slightly changed to a certain thin
white line:
namely rows of cocaine about to be snorted by any number of policemen. Whitaker's depiction of a drug addled mentor
to Jackson's character is alarming and disturbing. He stumbles through the film with a sort of slack jawed alacrity, and
there's little if any attempt to paint any of these characters with saving graces. Another mentor cop is an out and out
racist, a white man dropping the "n" word with abandon and repeatedly saying he wants to put the "monkeys" away
where they belong. Only one older cop seems to be a decent sort, mentoring his rookie to help out with a PAL
basketball team. Not so coincidentally, that selfsame rookie is the one who first attempts to break away from the drug
dealing and otherwise criminal activity that the Jackson character gets so easily sucked into.
But instead of being a down and dirty exposé of epic criminal activity on the part of police,
Freelancers descends
into a pretty trite revenge drama. We're privy to a series of flashbacks throughout the film, flashbacks that are
ostensibly there to make us wonder but which are so obvious it's completely clear that Malo, the Jackson character,
watched as a child when his father, a crooked cop himself, was killed after trying to come clean. Of course it turns out
that the De Niro character was no only Malo's father's partner in crime, but the man who put the hit out on Malo's dead,
turning the film into a sort of cat and mouse exercise as Malo first becomes an obedient lieutenant (figuratively) in the
crime syndicate and then is out to both exact revenge as well as make a name for himself. One of the few interesting
things about
Freelancers is its ambivalent ending, which posits Malo as playing both sides of the street, as it
were, perhaps snitching on the crime syndicate to the good guys while continuing his own career ascent as a Mob boss
himself.
Freelancers Blu-ray, Overall Score and Recommendation
Freelancers isn't downright horrible, but that's about the best thing you can say about it. The film is just ludicrous a
lot of the time, bouncing between characters (some of whom just up and disappear for long stretches of the movie) and
various plot points. Even supposedly dramatic moments like Malo's choice between shooting his girlfriend or his buddy are
then just moved past with literally nary a comment, as if to say, "Oh, well, fiddle-de-dee,
someone had to die." This
may have been a vanity project for Jackson (it certainly smacks of it), but that then begs the question as to why actors of
the caliber of De Niro or Whitaker (or, to a lesser extent, Delany) would want to get involved in something like this. Which
brings us back to the question that started this review: even the greatest actors need to eat, pay the bills, and maybe
stash a little moolah away for a rainy day, right?
