Emilio Estevez is a race car driver in the year 1991. He’s married to Rene Russo who has a killer set of legs. An early shot frames those legs against a messy bed. I distinctly remember this shot piquing my interest when I first saw it on Pay-Per-View as a 10 year old boy. Unfortunately, when the camera panned up, I was dismayed to discover it was not Russo at all, but the considerably boyish and oddly hairless Estevez, wearing a pair of whitey tidies.

One of the reasons I love B-movies is they’re often in a hurry to get to the good stuff. It’s not long before Emilio is racing his pink race car around the track while the music lets us know something bad is about to happen. Here’s what happens next in a dazzling (if not confusing) matter of seconds:

1. A closeup reveals a race car’s front tire has just rubbed Emilio’s back tire. Just before the camera cuts away, we see the tail end of Emilio’s car lift from the track.

2. An awkwardly inserted shot, one of pure cheese, zooms in on Russo wearing a dumb hat as she screams.

3. The camera cuts back to Emilio’s car, which is now sailing through the air (somehow) before it collides with an overpass and explodes in slow motion.

4. Emilio, sans car, falls on an operating table. The medical team waiting for him are dressed in silver hazmat suits, which A) lets us know this is the future and B) kind of makes them look like giant baked potatoes. One of the baked potatoes calls for “the lobotomy gun.”

5. Transient rebels (every 90s cyberpunk movie has ’em) attack the convoy… wait, did I forget to mention the operating table was housed inside a moving vehicle?

6. Mick Jagger acts… kind of.

7. The rebels’ missile launchers rock the vehicle Emilio’s in. He seizes the opportunity to swat away the lobotomy gun, which fires green lightning. One of the nurses screams, “We’ve got a freejack!”

8. Emilio escapes from the vehicle, which is somehow on its side now.

9. Mick Jagger instructs his henchmen to, and I quote, “Get the meat.”

10. Emilio, despite being the only person wearing a 90s jumpsuit, manages to evade the police of the future until he’s caught by a phone booth of all things. He’s a little slow, but eventually realizes he’s in the far-flung year of 2009, which is so far in the future, I frankly have a hard time imagining it.

The reason they set the bulk of the movie a few measly years later is so Emilio’s character can rekindle the flame with his wife, Russo, who’s barely aged a day. That’s all fine and dandy, but there’s talk of the “Ten Year Recession,” which means the movie was already dated eight years after it came out. Not that anyone involved with this turkey thought anyone but lame bloggers would be talking about it in the future.

So no, I won’t make fun of the dated stuff. What I will make fun of is the casting. The obvious mistake is Mick Jagger. I hoped he would be funny bad, but he’s just bad. And the problem with Emilio is he already looks eighteen years younger than Russo. I’m not saying Rene Russo looks old. I’m saying Emilio Estevez looks like the kind of guy who still gets carded at bars. (“Don’t you know who I am! Haven’t you seen Young Guns?“)

I have a lot of issues with this movie. One is the absurd lack of characters of color. One black man lives in Emilio’s old house, which is now a slum, another is Russo’s chauffeur, and the third is a bum. Movies about the future should have a good reason for only having white people in it and Freejack has no excuse.

Anthony Hopkins is the bad guy, by the way, stumbling into the picture exactly as the Emperor was introduced in The Empire Strikes Back, hooded cloak and all. So we’ve got Hopkins and Russo, two great actors neutralized by Mick Jagger’s ability to ham up absolutely anything.

The most watchable part comes towards the end. There’s a fun sequence taking place inside the mind of Anthony Hopkins, though it’s nothing really new to the genre. Unfortunately, I’d been struggling to stay awake for so much of the movie, I finally fell asleep at that point and missed most of the good stuff. When I woke up, Mick Jagger had somehow turned into a good guy.

My biggest complaint is the lackluster romance between Emilio and Russo. When they’re reunited in 2009, Russo promptly turns him in to the authorities. When they’re reunited a second time, Emilio is inexplicably cruel. I don’t even remember if they ever kiss. The most they do is hold hands and speak to each other in whispers. What a dud.

Note: I haven’t read the Robert Sheckley novel Freejack was based on, but I admire Sheckley and I’m sure the book was better than this.