This action comedy from Taken director Pierre Morel has plenty pedigree but is unfortunately a half-hearted mongrel of a film that barely makes a fist of attempting its actually fairly appealing premise. Wasting a promising central pairing in John Cena and Alison Brie, it’s a thoroughly redundant watch and its lowkey release suggests the studio knows it too.

Mason Pettits (Cena) is invalided out of the US Special Forces after a failed assassination mission against Juan Venegas (Juan Pablo Raba), the dictator of the South American republic of Paldonia. With his day job as a lawyer so depressing that it’s eroding his family life, he accepts a security job from an ex-comrade (Christian Slater), to protect journalist Claire Wellington (Brie) as she journeys to Paldonia to interview Venegas. However, their arrival just happens to coincide with an attempted coup.

Ignore for a moment the fact that US history tends to involve the installation of dictators in Latin America rather than their removal, and this seems like a fun setup. Cena has impeccable comic timing as well as action smarts, as evidenced in the excellent Blockers, and Brie is one of the most appealing comedy performers around and has more than a little ringcraft of her own from GLOW. The idea of them getting their Romancing the Stone on seems like a jolly throwback, right down to the dubious Hollywood homogenising of the continent as a coke-fuelled cartel theme park. So how does it all go so wrong?

The main problem with its Freelance is its refusal to commit to any strand it dangles along the way. Any romantic element is snuffed out as soon as the possibility arises. It fails to establish itself as either a satisfactory comedy or actioner, getting caught in two minds of how far to push Venegas as a comic character – iffy territory for sure – and only offers a light dusting of decent, but mediocre, set-pieces. Poor Cena and Brie just about drag it all along, but the script simply doesn’t allow them to display any chemistry, despite their best efforts and innate screen presences.

As last year’s The Lost City demonstrates, this kind of old school romp still has an audience if it’s done with some flair, humour, and maybe a little thematic depth. There’s some chewy stuff in Freelance about media manipulation and the military industrial complex underneath (particularly given grim contemporary world events), but again, it’s actively ignored, almost to the point of upholding the very tropes it should in theory be critiquing. This is emblematic of the film overall. There’s a cynical laziness here that feels worse than it simply being aggressively bad.

Available on VoD from Mon 1 Jan 2024