Critic Reviews

The package as a whole, with its sun-bleached palette and colour correction that makes its blues pop, is reasonably entertaining, perfectly suited to watching on an airplane while flying to your next holiday destination.

Too tame in its violence to be thrilling, too flat in its gags to be funny, and too PG-minded to be genuinely sexy, Morel’s film arrives and exits like a mild breeze – totally and utterly forgettable. John Cena deserves better. And so do we.

Pierre Morel's uninspired work behind the camera goes hand in hand with the film’s nondescript title, dragging viewers through a moodless, toothless action hybrid that, at its best, plays as forgettably inept even with ammunition flying in all directions.

It just feels like a movie that was made because Cena and Brie agreed to star in it.

Freelance is this incredibly goofy jumble of tones, a movie that doesn’t know what it is or what it wants to be, flailing about as it far overstays its welcome.

Freelance fails to deliver on every front. Worse, it barely seems to try.

By its conclusion, what we’re left with is a cinematic Frankenstein, whose disparate genre elements have been cobbled together without much consideration or fuss.

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.

Freelance, like Cena’s Mason, wants to be something more, but maybe it should’ve settled for something a little more simplistic and straightforward and found the joy in that.

Raba is a hoot, and even if Csokas isn’t in the bloom of brawling, villainous youth, he gives fair value and he and Brie and Raba and even Cena show commitment to their parts in all this far beyond what this nonsense deserved.