Freejack

Overview: No, this is NOT a great movie, but I love the Rolling Stones, so sue me!

In Freejack, the earth’s environment has become severely damaged, to the point that most people suffer some form of illness. But technology has advanced to the point that someone’s consciousness can be transferred from one person to another. Also, a version of time travel, where a body can be taken forward to the “present” (2009), while risky, has become possible. Now, bounty hunters from the near future raid the past for perfect bodies with flatlined brains to bring forward in time to sell to the highest bidder. Emilio Estevez plays a race car driver who crashes and dies in a spectacular way on live TV back in 1992, but just before he dies, is taken to the future by a shady character played by Mick Jagger.

The Bottom Line: Freejack loses out incredibly on believability, as does it for its insanely fast prediction for both the destruction of the earth and the relatively rapid speed of technology progression. In retrospect, maybe this movie should have taken place in 2049 instead. One wonders Murphy took a cast with Emilio Estivez, Rene Russo and Anthony Hopkins and then churned out something so cheesy. It’s movies such as Freejack that gave cyberpunk films a poor quality image by the early 90s. Still, Jagger is pretty fun in this, as is the rest of the cast. As long as you turn off your brain, you should enjoy some decent cyberpunk visuals here.

EDIT: ETM reminds me in the comments below that Freejack also does bring up an interesting question that needs consideration: if technology gives life to a person, does the one who owns the technology own that life? This alone bumps it up to the “medium” catagory in the cyberpunk themes.