The first time I saw the trailer for this movie, I was hooked. Writer Matthew Vaughn of The Kingsman franchise with a spicy cameo from Dua Lipa, Sam Rockwell doing that spy thing he does, John Cena pulling people off of motor bikes, and a fire premise. A mousey action writer finds the plots of her books are being used by real life crime syndicates and she has to help stop them! I saw that some of the review headlines for Freelance seemed pretty tepid: “Allison Brie and John Cena wander aimlessly in the jungle without a script,” etc., etc., but who can argue with Matthew Vaughn and Dua Lipa?
I sat down in my chair and was pleased to see the movie start in medias res, more than that it was basically filmed on a GoPro camera fp POV! Christian Slater was our guys bff! Cool! I thought. We don’t know that we’re in one of the main character’s spy novels! It’s going to be so jarring and amazing when they pull the switcheroo on the audience and we’re already so invested in these characters who are actual fictional! But weird choice, I thought, because the trailer kind of gives the goods away, so it feels like there should be more winking at the camera that this isn’t real. It’s sort of melodrama? I rationalized at the sad piano music during John Cena’s abrupt winter sequence where his spinal injury from a mission forces him into a crappy desk job in a strip mall as a lawyer, playing dad to the world’s least charismatic child actor, but the melodrama feels a little stiff? About forty minutes into the quickly developing action sequence, as John Cena is rescuing people from a traffic stop, I thought about turning over to Friend–who strolled in and happily said he had no prior knowledge about the movie, to which I responded, “I’m just here for Dua Lipa!”–and joke about how the first act is really committed to the bit of not revealing that this is a novel.
It’s about an hour into the movie when it started to slowly creep on me that this might not in fact be the movie I intended to see. Where’s Dua Lipa? I kept asking to myself. Is she going to show up when we get to capital? So much of the movie is in the jungle though, and her role seems so integral to an early and kind of funny scene. Is the third act everything we see in the trailer? I started to question everything I knew about the way that trailers reveal plot. Why on earth would they wait for the reveal ninety minutes in? It’s going to trivialize so much of the earnestness of the dictator’s speech and the faux liberal anti-imperialist politics of this storyline when we find out it’s not really happening!
And then it ended. No Dua Lipa. No Sam Rockwell. That movie is called fucking Argyle and it probably won’t come out til 2025 based on the actor’s strike. I hesitate to link you to the trailer for fear that I will misdirect you to Freelance and I know that by mentioning these two movies in this one review that I’m already adding to what has to be an intentional confusion on the part of the marketing team. “How many movies can John Cena be in?” Friend lamented, who had laughed with me when we watched the trailer for what we thought was the very movie we were sat there waiting to watch. The answer is actually two. Two movies.
I kind of wanted to end the review here, mention something about the way that A Man Called Otto did me similarly dirty a few months ago as a means of suggesting maybe it’s a me problem (it’s not a me problem, it’s so clearly intentionally confusing), and be done with this, but I guess I should say something about how Melissa McCarthy’s Spy (and not The Spy Who Dumped Me) did a much better job of making comedy out of a spy thriller by subverting genre tropes. It’s sort of unfair to compare anything to Bullet Train, but it seems like there could’ve been a lot learned from that movie in terms of charming villains and witty combat. Allison Brie spends so much time holding her fucking iPhone that it’s hard to really take any of the survivalism seriously. Would’ve been a lot more believable if she had put it down while the helicopter came careening toward her, or when the gunshots broke out in that one room, but I guess she needed it? to livestream? evil speeches? No one else had an iPhone in the country, surely. Anyway, long story short, I got catfished and should’ve seen the evil Chucky Cheese one instead.
