At The Movies: Freelance is forgettable, It Lives Inside an unsettling Indian-American teen horror
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John Cena (right) plays a United States special forces veteran escorting a journalist (Alison Brie) in Freelance.
PHOTO: GOLDEN VILLAGE
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Freelance (NC16)
109 minutes, opens on Thursday
2 stars
The story: John Cena plays a United States special forces veteran escorting a journalist (Alison Brie) on her interview with a South American dictator (Juan Pablo Raba) when a military coup breaks out, forcing the mismatched trio to escape into the jungle.
And you thought Cena’s Hidden Strike (2023) with Jackie Chan was bad.
As a co-star, Brie – from the Netflix series Glow (2017 to 2019) – is more fetching than Chan, but the unsexy, unfunny odd-couple screwball adventure Freelance is so erratic, it barely holds together.
It is a movie where Brie’s snippy crusading journalist inexplicably becomes a minx by nightfall, seducing Cena with a striptease, and where the cruel and oily dictator is implausibly revealed to be a great patriot passionately defending his fictitious country from the exploitation of global conglomerates.
The only constant is the viewer’s boredom.
(From left) John Cena, Juan Pablo Raba and Alison Brie in Freelance.
PHOTO: GOLDEN VILLAGE
French action cinema journeyman Pierre Morel of District 13 (2004) and Taken (2008) stages the perfunctory jungle pursuits, muddy river crossings, gun battles and bazooka ambushes.
Nothing troubles much, because the rebel forces are faceless goons. Wrestling superstar-turned-Hollywood jock Cena easily mows them down to restore political order.
But the ones saving the day are really 1990s bad boy Christian Slater, in the side role of Cena’s army buddy, and Marton Csokas camping it up as the leader of the South African mercenaries. They bring welcome attitude to a forgettable outing.
Hot take: Consolation note to Cena – at least Fast X (2023) was a hit.
It Lives Inside (NC16)
99 minutes, opens on Thursday
3 stars
The story: Indian-American high-schooler Samidha (Megan Suri) is stalked by a malevolent demon that feeds on human flesh and bad vibes.
It Lives Inside is the feature debut of India-born American film-maker Bishal Dutta, based on his grandfather’s encounter with a girl carrying a mysterious jar.
In Dutta’s telling, the girl in question is Samidha’s estranged best friend Tamira (Mohana Krishnan), the only other ethnic student on campus, where the smart, popular Samidha goes by “Sam” and chooses to hang with the white kids. She even uses a skin-lightening filter for her selfie.
Megan Suri plays American high-schooler Samidha in It Lives Inside.
PHOTO: SHAW ORGANISATION
She has distanced herself from her Indian heritage – which includes Tamira, who has in the meantime become a creepy outcast, wandering around with the jar.
“There’s a monster in here,” she confides in terror.
Indeed there is. The Hindu entity Pishach is from the old country and it breaks free to abduct Tamira, then come after Sam, her parents (Vik Sahay and Neeru Bajwa), her boyfriend (Gage Marsh) and their teacher (Betty Gabriel).
It is a metaphor for Sam’s conflicted bicultural identity as a child of emigres.
Director-writer Dutta struggles with how much to make her internal demon an actual monster. When it is eventually manifested, the cheap creature design all but undoes the scares.
Even so, the story holds interest.
The South Sudan refugees of the 2020 British indie His House had their Apeth, or night witch, and the undocumented Senegalese of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival prize-winner Nanny had her African water spirit.
Dutta adds a South Asian voice to the recent immigrant-experience-as-horror sub-genre, and ends his urban legend with unsettling ambiguity.
Hot take: Dutta is a promising talent who has assimilated his family history and native mythology into a different kind of teen horror.
