Freelance: John Cena goes Commando in flaccid farrago

Freelance (R16, 108mins) Directed by Pierre Morel **

Not only did Frenchman Pierre Morel create one of the most unexpectedly memorable movies of the noughties, but 2008’s Taken also helped reinvent Liam Neeson as an action hero.

Unfortunately, since then, Morel’s attempts to recapture that lightning-in-a-bottle have proved disastrous. From Paris With Love, The Gunman and Peppermint delivered diminishing returns, both for audiences – and at the box-office.

Any hopes he might have reversed that trend are almost instantly dashed in the opening minutes of this joyless, leaden tale, as we discover that the cynical, morose character that is Mason Petit requires John Cena to be charisma-free.

Yes, he is the anti-Peacemaker, a legal eagle who thought he’d traded away a potential life of “backyard grills, playdates and over-planned holidays” for finding his true purpose in the army’s special forces, only to have that wrenched away when a mission gone awry leaves half of his team dead and Mason with career-ending injuries.

Reluctantly back practising the law, he’s bored by his clients – and increasingly estranged from his wife.

Enter Sebastian Earle (Christian Slater). Another survivor of that ill-fated chopper ride, he’s set up a global security firm – and he wants Mason to take charge of their first ever personal protection job.

Award-winning, but recently disgraced investigative journalist Claire Wellington (Alison Brie) needs a bodyguard for the biggest scoop of her career. She’s received an invitation to interview Paldonia president Juan Venegas (Juan Pablo Raba), who not only has a reputation as the worst dictator in South American history, but also hasn’t sat down with a foreign reporter for a decade.

He’s also the man Mason believes is responsible for his buddies’ deaths.

So, unsurprisingly, Mason initially declines, until the potential pay packet and wife’s pleas “to sort his life out” convince him otherwise. However, it’s a decision he almost instantly regrets, as he and Claire find themselves in the middle of an attempted coup, as Venegas escorts them to his country estate.

Much of Freelance’s failings lie in its lack of a consistent tone. Morel, working from long-time Jimmy Kimmel writer Jacob Lentz’s ploddingly predictable, but oddball script, just never seems to be sure – or convince – as to whether he’s making 2023’s answer to The Lost City or Caracas Has Fallen.

With his daughter dotage and troubled past, you’d swear Mason was a character with Gerard Butler’s name all over it (rather than Cena), while his advice to Claire varies from “read Hannah Arendt” to “embrace the suck” in a single scene.

Too much of the expository heavy lifting and strangely deep political discourse is done by the dialogue, pretty much suffocating any comedic potential in the process, while virtually every character we meet makes fun of Mason’s surname. Brie’s (M3gan) character is badly underwritten, New Zealand’s Marton Csokas (The Bourne Supremacy) reveals an accent that’s straight out of the late, great Joss Ackland’s guide to broad Afrikaans, as perfected in Lethal Weapon 2, while that franchise is also homaged in the film’s one “sexy” scene.

The rest is simply an increasing farrago of forgettable fromage, as an over-caffeinated and cloying soundtrack attempts to persuade us how we should feel. Mostly, it’s likely to be a mix of disappointment – and boredom.

Freelance is now screening in select cinemas nationwide.