Weirdhouse Cinema Rewind: Freejack

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, you welcome to Weird House Cinema Rewind. This is
Rob Lamb.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
And this is Joe McCormick. And today on Weird House
Cinema Rewind, we're gonna be featuring an older episode of
Weird House Cinema, the one we did on free Jack
starring Emilio Estevez, Mick Jagger. What was Anthony Hopkins in
this one?

Speaker 1 (00:24):
Yeah? He is?

Speaker 2 (00:25):
Is Renee Russo in it? Where's all of these names
come from? And my memory, I.

Speaker 1 (00:30):
Mean, it's it's all about Mick Jagger. It's all about
getting the meat right.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
Get the meat that's right.

Speaker 1 (00:37):
All right? So in free Jack, there is one hundred
percent chance of bone jacking occurring. And you know what,
if you tune into Monday Night Football tonight on ESPN,
I'd say maybe there's a fifty to fifty chance they'll
be bone jacking. But I am to understand there's one
hundred percent chance there's gonna be some sort of interesting
shenanigans from PayPal. That's the word around the office here
at any rate, Do with that what you will. Football fans,

(01:00):
that's right, football fans, tal alert. And now, without any
further ado, let's get into free Jack.

Speaker 3 (01:09):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (01:19):
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.

Speaker 2 (01:23):
And I'm Joe McCormick. And boy, we have got a
treat for you today, one that has been a long
time coming for me personally, because we're going to be
talking about a nineteen ninety Oh I've already forgotten the year.
Was it ninety one or ninety two?

Speaker 1 (01:37):
I believe it came out in ninety.

Speaker 2 (01:38):
Two, Okay, a nineteen ninety two science fiction film called
Free Jack. And I have a personal history with this movie,
which is that I have owned this DVD for approximately
fifteen years, and until this weekend, I had never watched it.
I remember buying it for three dollars and ninety five
cents at an East Tennessee used bookstore sometime when I

(02:01):
was in college. Because on the cover of the DVD
case it has a picture of Emilio Estevez holding some
kind of futuristic looking gun, and then a bunch of
very very foggy future corridors, and then Mick Jagger looking
very stern like he's going to dole out some punishment.
Anthony Hopkins holding his fingers in front of his face

(02:23):
like he's going to smoke a cigar or something, and
Renee Russo wearing like an mc escher pattern.

Speaker 1 (02:29):
Yeah. I remember the VHS box art for this. I
remember the the you know, the covers. I remember the trailer.
It looks like it's gonna be tremendous fun. It looks
really badass. In fact, I have very strong memories of
when this came out because I was fourteen, and you know,
I don't even remember what my favorite films were at
that point. You know, I guess that's post Batman, so

(02:51):
I guess Batman was still in the mix. But I was,
you know, exploring some more sci fi, getting into that
reading sci fi, and then I saw the trailer for
free Jack, and I was just convinced that this was
going to be a great film. I got so excited
about it. I'm like looking through copies of Newsweek to
try and follow the coverage of free Jack, and that
was a little disappointed when it was there.

Speaker 2 (03:13):
You're like making a scrap booking the I.

Speaker 1 (03:16):
Would do that with other films, like yeah, I had
done that with Batman. When it came out, I was
like cutting out all these pictures. I made like scrapbook
pages of it. I was so excited about it. I
did that with Dick Tracy.

Speaker 2 (03:27):
That's fandom.

Speaker 1 (03:28):
Yeah, and then this came and I'm like, let's do it.
I'm down. This is the next one. This is going
to be the next film that I'm crazy for. And
then it hit theaters and I remember I was I
was calling my local theater in the small Tennessee town
that I lived in, and I was like, when are
you all getting free Jack? When's free Jack coming? And
they they didn't have an answer for that, because of
course the answer was free Jack was not coming to

(03:49):
a small town.

Speaker 2 (03:51):
Is mister Jagger going to be here for the premiere?
Can I get them to sign my poster?

Speaker 1 (03:55):
Yeah? Well, I just thought it was going to be
this huge thing that everybody was going to be obsessed with.
Turns out people weren't obsessed with it. Turns out this
was what a January release. This was a film that
had experienced troubles, that was pretty much known, I think,
to not be that good, and was just dumped unceremoniously

(04:17):
in the January release window of nineteen ninety two.

Speaker 2 (04:21):
Yeah, floppiject season. Yeah, but There's a lot of good
movies get released in the winter, though, but oh yeah,
a lot of this is something that I think often
happens with horror movies that should be released in October.
But there's just a sign of utter disrespect by the
studios that release them, often good ones. I don't know
if the studio is playing into it in this case,

(04:42):
but like when The Witch came out, I think it
was released in February or something just utterly inexplicable. Why
not in October?

Speaker 1 (04:50):
Yeah, I don't know. You know, as much as I
love movies and I love charting all this stuff, yeah,
I don't have as good ahead for other aspects of
movie production, and you know, and certainly the calendar of
putting them out another thing I don't usually have a
good head for. I usually don't get obsessed with the
budgets on things, but sometimes it's notable, and I was
checking this one out, I did notice that this was

(05:10):
a thirty million dollar picture, which I my understanding is
that that was still quite a chunk of change for
a film in nineteen ninety one, nineteen ninety two, So
this was a this was a big budget affair, and
certainly when we start getting into connections. A lot of
names were involved in this picture. Oh yeah, so this
may be the most expensive film that we've yet covered

(05:32):
on Weird House Cinema. This was this was a mainstream shot.
This was something that that was born to be a blockbuster,
but it just didn't happen.

Speaker 2 (05:40):
This is a parade of heavy hitters, both in terms
of a list stars. He had Emilio Estevez, who was,
you know, a big deal in the early nineties. He
had Renee Russo, Anthony Hopkins, Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones.
But then also it's just filled out with a ton
of great character actors in the in the mid level roles.

Speaker 1 (05:58):
Yeah, I don't think everybody's necessarily cast in a good spot.
Right by the end of this episode, I will recast
the picture in a way that I think will work
better or would have worked better. But yeah, it's still
a very fun picture to discuss, has a lot of
cool elements in it, just everything didn't come together like
it should.

Speaker 2 (06:17):
No see this one's I think it's going to be
a lot of fun to talk about. Ultimately, I think
it's a little disappointing to actually watch and one of
the main reasons is the weirdness and the absurdity is
not concentrated enough. The movie goes on too long, it's
stretched out too much. But we'll try to press it
down into a diamond for you. The listener.

Speaker 1 (06:39):
All right, well, let's let's go ahead and have that
elevator pitch.

Speaker 2 (06:42):
Joe, Okay, So the pitch is in the early nineties,
Formula one racer Alex Furlong is about to die in
a fiery crash when he is suddenly time warped into
the dystopian hell of the year two thousand and nine
by mercenaries under the command of Mick Jagger a guy

(07:02):
named Visindak, and they want to sell his body to
a rich dead man who's currently living inside a computer
and needs a new meat vehicle so that he can
live forever and achieve his dreams. But before the transfer
to the new meat vehicle can take place, for long
escapes and now he is what is referred to in

(07:22):
the future as a free jack, and he spends the
rest of the movie running around, being chased by Mick
Jagger and trying to put the pieces together.

Speaker 1 (07:31):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (07:32):
Now, before we get into the contents of the film itself,
this movie really does have something that I love, which
is a good, crappy, early two thousands DVD menu experience.

Speaker 1 (07:44):
Oh yeah.

Speaker 2 (07:45):
Yeah. In fact, I was just talking to Seth before
we started recording about how someday, someday, I almost want
to do a whole exploration just of the genre of
early DVD menus that tried to do too much and
we're really aesthetically repulsive and had strange sort of CGI animations.
One of my favorites is the DVD menu for the

(08:07):
movie Leviathan, which has exactly one animation, and it's just
like a guy in a diving suit who sort of
like does a half turned step and then pivots back
to his original position and then does that over and
over forever.

Speaker 1 (08:20):
Oh wow. Yeah, I mean even the ones that were
really well done, Like I think one of the first
DVDs I bought, and I wasn't an early adopter on
that technology, but I picked up this double DVD special
edition of Big Trouble in Little China, the John Poker film,
and yeah, it was they really put a lot of
effort into it. You know, it's like so many different
extra features, a lot of cool extra features. But then

(08:42):
at times you're just kind of waiting for the graphics
to stop doing things so you can actually push play
on the movie.

Speaker 2 (08:48):
Yeah. Yeah, so this one, it has these crappy CGI menus.
One of the features it has is a rotating CGI
jack like in the Game of Jacks. And I was
confused at first, because again I despite owning the CVD
for like fifteen years or something, I had never seen
it until this weekend. So I was like, wait a minute,
does the title free Jack refer to some kind of

(09:12):
jack like in.

Speaker 1 (09:13):
Jack's Oh, this would be the what's it called the
spiritual Uh? Yeah, god? What they call it? The spiritual
the spiritual switchboard?

Speaker 2 (09:25):
Spiritual switchboard? Yes, yes, yes, So it's a piece of
technology that actually shows up at the end of the
movie and looks exactly like a Jack from a Game
of Jacks.

Speaker 1 (09:33):
Oh man, I just realized as a Jack. Was that
on purpose?

Speaker 2 (09:36):
I don't know, Like with the title free Jack? Yeah,
I don't know. But then there's another thing on this
DVD that was just cavir on my tongue. It was
a menu option called Experience our Website, which when you
click it, all it does is it takes you to
a screen that shows you the URL of Morgan Creek

(09:56):
Motion Pictures, which is www dot Morgan Creek, and then
you have the option to go back to the main menu.

Speaker 1 (10:03):
So you would have to like write it down on
the sheet of paper and take it to your computer. Wow.
So good.

Speaker 2 (10:13):
Anyway, let's hit some trailer audio.

Speaker 4 (10:18):
Alex Furlong is about to die and enter the year
two thousand and nine, where immortality is only a heartbeat away,
where money can buy anything.

Speaker 1 (10:36):
Shouldn't you consider an alternative bite.

Speaker 4 (10:39):
Started to deceive you, including life itself, lose your mind
and you can live forever.

Speaker 2 (10:55):
Free Jack.

Speaker 1 (11:00):
See sounds exciting, sounds great, sounds like it's gonna be
one heck of a movie.

Speaker 2 (11:03):
Right. If you'd been a kid at the time, you'd
be writing your local theater saying, make the free Jack
World premiere happen here.

Speaker 1 (11:10):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (11:11):
But so there are some key concepts in the film
that we're going to have to explain now, I think
for this discussion to make any sense. And one of
the distinctions that is that is most important is that
between the bone Jack and the bone Jacker and the
free Jack. Right.

Speaker 1 (11:29):
So essentially, again, the whole idea here is people who
died in horrific accidents in the past. A lot of
times you know exactly when they died, where they died,
and you know that there's like a catastrophic event like
in this case a car wreck, a race car wreck,
so you know exactly where in time and space to
reach back and steal their body, in other words, jack

(11:53):
their bones. It's called bone jacking, and the people who
do it are bone.

Speaker 2 (11:57):
Jackers, right, So they're bone jackers. And the person who
gets bone jacked from the past to the future to
become somebody's meat vehicle, that person is the bone jack.

Speaker 1 (12:07):
Okay do they call them that? I thought maybe they
were just jacks, but they're called bone jacks.

Speaker 2 (12:12):
I think they're called bone jack So the victim is
the bone jack. The verb would be to bone jack someone.
And then if you're one of these mercenaries who does
the bone jacking, you're a bone jacker.

Speaker 1 (12:23):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (12:23):
But then if a bone jack gets loose, then all
bets are off and they're a free jack, right, It's
like being a free agent.

Speaker 1 (12:30):
So then they have to try and either jack the
free jack or bone jack the free jack in order
to get them back.

Speaker 2 (12:37):
Right, for the bone Jack. Yes, yes, okay, that's right.
But I was thinking about, Okay, so the people who
who are the prime candidates for bone jacking in the
premise of this film are It's basically going to be
anyone who died on videotape with like a precise time
code and so you know the time and place where
they died, and that's well recorded and survives into the future.

(12:58):
So I realized, like, oh, probably all of the people
who are who were first in line to get bone
jacked are the people from the faces of death videos.

Speaker 1 (13:10):
Sometimes they don't actually die, right, Sometimes that stuff's fake. Right.

Speaker 2 (13:13):
Oh really, I've never actually watched one. I just remember
that was the thing when I was in high school
or whatever this is if you don't remember, these were
like morbid video cassettes of just like footage of people
dying and in various ways.

Speaker 1 (13:26):
Yeah, I mean, and I guess it does help if
it is a case where something blows up, because then
there's more, it's less mystery of the body suddenly vanishes,
you know, right before they would die.

Speaker 2 (13:35):
I mean, I think there'd still be a mystery. They
establish in this movie that there's a mystery.

Speaker 1 (13:39):
Yeah, but there's a difference between Okay, there was a
car wreck and we never found the body to somebody
fired a bullet at JFK and then he vanished, you know,
and then it turns out he was bone jacked and
now is a body for some like super rich dude
in the future. Like that just doesn't make any sense.
That would be a huge incident.

Speaker 2 (13:57):
Okay. So the film was directed by a guy named
Jeff Murphy who is a New Zealand film director who
passed away in twenty eighteen. His breakout film seems to
have been a New Zealand road trip movie that I've
never seen, called Goodbye pork Pie. But he had a
Hollywood period in which he directed films like Young Guns two,
which I didn't check, but I'm pretty sure that does

(14:19):
star Emilio Estevez.

Speaker 1 (14:20):
It is, Yeah, it is an okay film.

Speaker 2 (14:23):
Yeah, so connection there, Young Guns two in nineteen ninety
Free Jack in ninety two, so you can see the
connection there. But then he also directed a prestige period
drama I think about the regency period known as Under
Siege two Dark Territory in nineteen ninety five.

Speaker 1 (14:38):
I've seen that one. That one has a terrible lead
but has has some really talented people in it, because
Eric Bogosian plays the main villain. And then I want
to say, you have.

Speaker 2 (14:51):
Who's Eric Bogosian? I've heard that name.

Speaker 1 (14:53):
Oh, Eric Bogosian. He's been in a ton of stuff.
You've definitely seen him in things I think he was in. Well,
most recently he was in Uncut Gems. But he's been
in a ton of stuff.

Speaker 2 (15:04):
Yeah, he was in another Regency era drama, Charlie's Angels
Full Throttle, and he was a voice. I just looked
this up. He was a voice in Beavis and butthead
do America.

Speaker 1 (15:14):
Well, yeah, there you go. He's an impressive actor, I
would say. But yeah, so I saw that movie. It
also had Steven Saga on it, of course, but yeah,
what can you do?

Speaker 2 (15:23):
But Jeff Murphy was also a second unit director for
some big, you know, mainstream films, like like Peter Jackson's
Lord of the Rings trilogy. He did second unit stuff.
He did Dante's Peak, Triple X, State of the Union.

Speaker 1 (15:38):
All right, So yeah, he had a pretty solid career. Now,
one thing about this film, this is something I didn't
realize back in the day when I originally watched it,
and it was just kind of a creeping realization as
I was watching it just the other day, and it
is that this was filmed I think, entirely in Atlanta, Georgia,
in the city in which we live, the city that

(15:58):
we're recording this episode.

Speaker 2 (15:59):
In around like you saw Peachtree in it, didn't you
do you recognize suddenly when they're downtown and they're like,
there's Mortes stations and stuff.

Speaker 1 (16:06):
Well, by that point I had looked it up, but
early on in the film, there's just a lot of
like you're in two thousand and nine, it's in the future,
and everything's like kind of gritty and industrial in a
way that plenty of parts of Atlanta still are. So
I was kind of thinking it was like, you know,
it's kind of an Atlanta feel to it, and then
I'm like, wait, I should look this up, and sure enough,
filmed in Atlanta. Of course, nowadays everything's filmed in Atlanta,

(16:29):
filmed in Georgia, so it doesn't really mean anything. But
you know, back back in the day, there weren't that
many films filming in Atlanta, so it's it's kind of notable.

Speaker 2 (16:37):
This one has some of the exact same locations and
streets featured in Baby Driver.

Speaker 1 (16:42):
Yeah, like you could.

Speaker 2 (16:43):
You could compare Free Jack and Baby Driver and do
some side by sides.

Speaker 1 (16:47):
Like they went to film Baby Driver and they're like, look,
we'll give you the free Jack package. This is what
it consists on.

Speaker 2 (16:52):
You know, another dystopian future movie that uses Mortes stations.
There were cut scenes from Escape from New York that
were filmed in moretestations in Atlanta.

Speaker 1 (17:01):
Yeah. Yeah. Of course the High Museum here in Atlanta
is famously where doctor Hannibal Lecter was housed in Manhunter,
the original adaptation of Red Dragon.

Speaker 2 (17:13):
M h Yeah, so played by Brian Cox.

Speaker 1 (17:16):
Yeah. Yeah, a tremendous role. That was a really really
fun film, as I recall. But of course nowadays everything
is filmed around Atlanta, so it's it can be excruciating
at times. I find like I'm watching Cobra Kai and
they film like all of it in Atlanta, like everywhere,
Like I expect to see myself see out of my
own house and take out the garbage in the background

(17:36):
in a scene, you know, so I don't know, it
kind of takes me out of the experience sometimes these days.
But it's fun with these older films for some reason.

Speaker 2 (17:44):
Yeah. So this was actually based on a novel, I think,
but maybe loosely based.

Speaker 1 (17:49):
Yes, the novel very loosely based on a novel by
Robert Sheckley. He lived nineteen twenty eight through two thousand
and five, and it was quite successful. The book in
question was nineteen fifty eight More Tality, Inc. And originally
I didn't have time to read any of this book.
But originally the transit is from nineteen fifty eight to

(18:09):
the year twenty one to ten, so much further in
the into the future.

Speaker 2 (18:15):
But anyway, Yeah, by shortening that length though that that
dramatically changes what's possible with the plot in terms of
meeting people who you previously knew and not appearing to
have aged a single day in between.

Speaker 1 (18:27):
Yeah. So it's supposedly a good book. I'd love to
hear from anyone out there who's read it. I read
that it, you know, it doesn't again, doesn't have much
to do with this movie. I don't think the terms
free jacker bonejacker used it all in the book, and
I think there's supposedly a sequence in it where a
guy the main character, gets in line for something and
then finds out it's a suicide booth, which of course

(18:48):
is a gag in Futurama in the first episode of that, right,
but yeah, so very loosely based on a novel. Also,
there are a number of people that are credited on
the screenplay for this, and we'll get back to one
in a bit, but one of the people is Ronald Shusett,
who worked with Dan O'Bannon on Alien and Total Recall.

Speaker 2 (19:10):
Ah, two great sci fi scripts.

Speaker 1 (19:12):
Yeah, all right, now we've got our lead. Our star,
Emilio Estevez plays the character Alex Furlong. Now, Estevez is,
of course the nephew of noted B movie icon Joe Estevez,
And you lead with that, Yeah, yeah, I mean he's
also the son of acting legend Martin Sheen, whose, of
course real name is Ramon Estevez. So if you weren't

(19:33):
aware of that, like Martin Sheen, that's his Hollywood name,
his real name is Estevez. H And yeah, so you
know Martin Sheen from stuff like Apocalypse Now or Spawn.
He's been in everything.

Speaker 2 (19:44):
I was just thinking how funny it was that you
don't you don't often put it together in your brain,
or at least I don't that like Martin Sheen, who
played the President on the West Wing, who's this kind
of like grumpy but kind irascible fatherly figure. He's presented
this lovable nerd. Is also the main character from Apocalypse
Now and the villain from Spawn.

Speaker 1 (20:06):
Yeah. I mean, he's been in so many different types
of films. He's been in some crap, you know, not
as much as Joe Estevez, but you know, but he
was in some really great films, especially early in his career.
Nineteen seventy Three's bad Lands by Terrence Malick, wonderful picture.

Speaker 2 (20:22):
Emilia Estevez was was, I guess, pretty young at the
time this was filmed. I don't know exactly how he
was in his twenties, I guess.

Speaker 1 (20:29):
Yeah, I'm not sure, but he was. Certainly he was
chugging right along. I mean, he'd been in the Breakfast Club,
the Young Guns, films, Repoman, a true cult classic, the
Mighty Ducks that came later, I guess, and then of
course he was in Maximum Overdrive, So you know, he's
been I think this was a movie that came out
at a time when he was very much the sort

(20:50):
of name you would put ahead of Mick Jagger on
a film.

Speaker 2 (20:53):
That's pretty weird. So, of course, the thing that mainly
drew me into this when I picked it up at
the used bookstore was that it stars Mick Jagger, and
I had no idea Mick Jagger had ever been in
a movie at this time. Of course, Mick Jagger the
lead singer of the Rolling Stones. I was so my
mind was so rendered by the idea of him being

(21:15):
in a movie at all. I wonder if that sort
of prevented me from watching it in the years in between,
because I was almost kind of scared to find out
what it was like.

Speaker 1 (21:24):
Like, you were afraid that his performance would just be
so good that it would change you on a fundamental level.

Speaker 2 (21:28):
Yeah, how can you really make informed decisions about transformative change?

Speaker 1 (21:34):
Yeah, it's so. Yeah, Mick Jagger's presence in this film
is interesting. Mick Jagger is I think you would call
him an intermittent actor at best. You look him up
on IMDb and most of his film credits are himself
in concert footage. But when he does act, when he
has acted, it's been all over the place. So his

(21:56):
first screen role was the lead in nineteen seventies Ned Kelly,
which I haven't seen it, but it does seem very
much like, Hey, we got this young fella here. He's
the front man of this popular band. Let's put him
in a movie. And then in nineteen eighty six he
was in a film called Laughter in the Dark, based
on a book by Nabokov that I haven't read. Are

(22:18):
you familiar with this one?

Speaker 2 (22:19):
I think I've heard of it, but I've never read it, Okay.

Speaker 1 (22:22):
And then in nineteen ninety seven he was in an
adaptation of Bent, which based on the play by Martin Sherman.
This is about the persecution of homosexuals doing the third Reich,
you know, very very serious, very stirring piece of drama.
And then he'll still occasionally act in things seemingly when
the mood hits him. But I think this is this

(22:43):
may be free Jack maybe one of the few, like
really like big budget kind of action films that he
pops up in. And I don't think he really has
another appearance in his career like.

Speaker 2 (22:53):
This, well, because one was enough, clearly. I mean his
role in this film changed him, It changed the world,
I would say, probably my Well, I don't know. There
are a couple of things I really did love about
Free Jack One was just a spectacular scene with Frankie
Faison that we'll get to in a minute. But Mick
Jagger also, he really rules this movie, especially when he's

(23:17):
not talking.

Speaker 1 (23:18):
Like he's best when he's not talking.

Speaker 2 (23:21):
Yes, just reaction shots where he's wearing a spaceball's helmet
or a shot that suddenly cuts to him and we
get to see him in a coat with like gigantic
shoulder pads and you know, ankle link dragging. It's his costume.
Is Mick Jagger's costumes, Mick Jagger's reaction shots and occasionally
when Mick Jagger laughs at something that this movie really

(23:42):
kicks into high gear.

Speaker 1 (23:43):
He has absolutely has a great coat in this His
costuming is is phenomenal. But but yeah, I guess it's
one of those things you can't help but compare Mick
Jagger the actor to David Bowie the actor. And with
David Bowie you were able to in I think most,
if not all, of his film roles, the mystique of
David Bowie the musical performer translated to the film roles

(24:05):
that he took on and made them work marvelously. Like
David Bowie was great and everything he was in I
can't think of anything I've seen David Bowie in where
I'm like that was disappointing. But mc jagger the you know,
the calculus didn't work there, The transit was not successful.

Speaker 2 (24:22):
David Bowie's visual presence in a film is the equivalent
of the creaky lore theme from the soundtrack to The
Lord of the Rings. You know, like it really it
conjures up the same kind of fog of the ancients.

Speaker 1 (24:38):
Yeah, absolutely so. We'll have more to say about mc
jagger's performance in this film as we proceed, but we should.
We should also hit on the fact that Renee Russo's
in this she plays Julie Redland, the love interest in
the past that is also the love interest in the future.
And say what you will about this movie or Russo's
I think, you know, perfectly fine but probably forgettable for performance.

(24:59):
But she met her husband on this film. One of
its mini screenwriters was Dan Gilroy, who also went on
to write and direct twenty fourteen's Nightcrawler. Oh wow, yeah,
so say so. No matter what you think of the picture,
some good stuff came out of it.

Speaker 2 (25:16):
Anthony Hopkins has an excellent check collecting scene in this film. Yea,
Anthony Hopkins is a fabulous actor, but this is I
would say you could show this his scene in this
movie as like the classroom textbook example of phoning it
in if you were trying to explain that concept.

Speaker 1 (25:37):
Yeah. I mean he's not asked to do much. No,
his character from the get go is dead and is
just a like brain waves and a giant jack in
the sky. Yeah, but still he's Anthony Hopkins, so he
classes up every scene he's in and makes you believe
it on a level that just Emilio Estevez is not
capable of doing it.

Speaker 2 (25:58):
Yeah, it's a little rough. I guarantee you that when
Anthony Hopkins delivered his lines in the single takes of
the scenes that we saw that made it into the
final version of the movie, that was the first time
he had read them.

Speaker 1 (26:12):
Yeah, I would not doubt it. Now. Another actor that
I think everybody will will pretty much recognize now that
that is in it is Jonathan Banks, who plays his
character Michelette Micholette.

Speaker 2 (26:25):
Michelette Michelette. He's like, he's like a creepy he's a
business executive, he's a suit Yeah.

Speaker 1 (26:34):
So uh yeah. Banks was born in forty seven. He's
had a whole career of playing heavies with eyes you
can't trust. He's got these Yeah, he's got these these eyes.
You just look at him and you're like that, that
guy's bad back. He's a lion.

Speaker 2 (26:46):
Yeah, he's he was.

Speaker 1 (26:47):
Made to play like mercenaries and dirty cops and you
know thugs. You know, that's like his whole thing.

Speaker 2 (26:54):
He looks like somebody whose hobby is shoplifting golf equipment.

Speaker 1 (26:58):
Yeah. Now, everybody now definitely knows him as Mike, first
from Breaking Bad and then from the fabulous prequel A
Better Call Saul, And he's tremendous on those shows because
it gives him a chance to be this cold, heavy
but also play this aging, emotional human being with you know,
with human connections in his life. That was not always

(27:19):
the case with the kind of roles that Banks would
have because he's he's been in so many things. He
often plays again like cops and heavies. He was Deputy
Brent in Grimlins in eighty four. Let's see. He was
in a few episodes of Tales. He was in one
episode of Tales from the Crypt. He was in an
episode of Highlander, the TV series he was in Deep
Space nine. He was a show regular slash lead on

(27:40):
Wise Guy from eighty seven through ninety. He was in
Murder She wrote, he was on airplane just so much stuff.

Speaker 2 (27:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (27:47):
But his first screen role is a nineteen seventy four
education short from the Los Angeles Public Library titled Linda's
Film on Menstruation. Oh, so it's worth looking up.

Speaker 4 (27:59):
You know.

Speaker 1 (27:59):
It's just educational short film and it's on YouTube, and
you get to see baby Jonathan Banks in there playing
like this gruff guy who doesn't understand menstruation.

Speaker 2 (28:10):
Oh, he's like a don't do what Donnie don't does.

Speaker 1 (28:13):
Yeah, Like he's sitting on the couch and he's like,
I don't understand menstruation. So that the woman in the
room turns on the TV and there's an animation. There's
a cartoon that explains it all.

Speaker 2 (28:22):
So oh I see.

Speaker 1 (28:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:24):
So he's he's ready to learn. He's not somebody who's
just like just doesn't get it.

Speaker 1 (28:29):
Yeah. But his face he has that. One of the
great things about Jonathan Banks. He has a great, like
smoldering look, like he's great at at just expressing that
I don't I don't really care what's going on here
with my with my you know, just my eyes and
kind of like the melting features of my face. So
he has that going on in that scene. You can
definitely see it's it forecast everything to come in his career, Like,

(28:51):
this is a guy that's going to play a lot
of heavies, fair enough, all right, So he's essentially your
one of your sub villains here, one of your top
three anyway. But then you have a whole host of
additional players in this film as well.

Speaker 2 (29:03):
God, the cast is huge.

Speaker 1 (29:05):
Yeah. For instance, you have this character named Brad who
shows up in the past and the future, played by
David Johansson, which if you like me and you, I
don't know, you grew up watching the right era of
MTV or the right reruns of Saturday Night Live, then
you probably will recognize him as Buster Poindexter.

Speaker 2 (29:21):
Oh no, I know him as New York Dolls and Scrooged.

Speaker 1 (29:25):
Oh yeah, yeah. That was one of his big screen roles,
is Scrooge. There's another great one, and that's Tales from
the Dark Side, the movie in which he plays an
assassin in the Cat from Hell segment, which is based
on a Stephen King short story.

Speaker 2 (29:38):
Oh yeah, I remember that.

Speaker 1 (29:39):
I remember the cat like goes down his throat and
jumps out his stomach.

Speaker 2 (29:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (29:43):
Great, yep, yeah.

Speaker 2 (29:46):
Oh, but he's great in this.

Speaker 1 (29:48):
Yeah. Yeah, he's great. He's like, what is pit boss
or something? He's somebody knows in the past, and then
in the future he looks him up, and of course
now he's in the Hell City of two thousand and
nine America. This character, Brad is just a low life
who instantly betrays him and gets shot.

Speaker 2 (30:06):
Yeah. Amanda Plumbers in this.

Speaker 1 (30:10):
Yeah, the daughter of the late great Christopher Plumber, best
known for She's probably best known for stuff like pulp
fiction and The Fisher King. She often plays characters with
a really fantastic frantic energy. She's a wonderful character actor,
I would say, a wonderful weird character actor. She's also
in an excellent episode of the nineties Outer Limits series
that I recently watched, titled A Stitch in Time, where

(30:33):
she plays the time traveling doctor Thereesa Givens, who, like Go,
uses her time machine to kill sexual predators in the past. Yeah.
So she actually won an Emmy for that. She's great
in it.

Speaker 2 (30:46):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (30:47):
In this, she plays a nun with a shotgun.

Speaker 2 (30:49):
That's right. I kept calling her sister Shotgun when.

Speaker 1 (30:52):
I think that's her name. I can't remember what else
it could be. I think she's just none. Actually, I
think she's credited as Oh, let's see who else we have. Okay,
we have grand l Bush places character Boone, who's sort
of a corpo samurai, like right out of the Cyberpunk
role playing game and video game franchise.

Speaker 2 (31:12):
Yes, he's like a he's like a corporate executive slash
bodyguard or like mercenary type guy. Who. So he's he's
in the corporate world, but he's skilled. He's got a
katana and stuff.

Speaker 1 (31:26):
Yeah, he's always carrying around this short samurai sword and
he has a gun. He's wearing a big suit. Yeah.
So he's yeah, like I say, right out of Cyberpunk.

Speaker 2 (31:35):
So I knew this guys from die Hard, in which
he's one of the two FBI agents who come in.
He's Special Agent Johnson. It's him and Robert dove Who
are the two FBI guys?

Speaker 1 (31:47):
Oh, okay, yeah those are some some Dovey's definitely heavy.
I think I probably knew Bush best from playing ball
Rock and Street Fighter too. No street Fighter. It's not
street Fighter too. It's just street Fighter, the Jean Claude
van Dam version of that. But yeah, he's been in
a bunch of so. He was in Exorcist three, he
was in License to Kill. I think I remember him

(32:09):
from that. Basically, he did a bunch of nineties action.
He was in Demolition Man. But make no mistake about
Grandell Bush. He was a highly trained actor who did
everything from Shakespeare and to like seventy stage musicals, like
rock musicals.

Speaker 2 (32:23):
Oh, he was in Hair.

Speaker 1 (32:23):
Yeah, he was in Hair. He did a lot of
TV work. He did Roots, he was in the color purple.
And again, this is one of the weird things about
free Jack is that it brings people together because he
like so, yeah, he also met his wife, his wife
of twenty six years in counting on this picture. What okay?
So his wife, she was a journalist for Beet and

(32:47):
she was on set to interview him about his role
in this film, and magic happened. The magic of Freejack
brought them together.

Speaker 2 (32:56):
Free Jack, I mean it just gets people in a
place where they're ready to commit, you know.

Speaker 1 (33:01):
All right. Up next, this is another bit player in it.
He just has one maybe two crazy scenes.

Speaker 2 (33:06):
I think just one scene, but he's great in it.
This is Frankie Faison, yeah, who you might know best
from playing Burrell in The Wire, but he's also Barney
in the Hannibal Lecture movies. He's a great actor. He's
very good at having like a kind of a calming presence,
soft voice, but in this he's exactly the opposite. And

(33:27):
this he's electric as this guy who gives in my view,
an oscar worthy monologue about rat based cuisine and then
a sort of Hamlet style to be or not to
be soliloquy, except it's about an eagle who's trying to
decide whether to commit suicide.

Speaker 1 (33:42):
Yeah. Yeah, and his character is listed as Eagleman. Yeah,
that's his.

Speaker 2 (33:46):
Whole eagle monologue.

Speaker 1 (33:47):
Yeah yeah, it's a yeah, this is the weirdest thing
in the whole picture at this scene, Like this is
Frankie's keeping it weird for us with this one. But yeah, Yeah,
He's been in a ton of things over the years.
He was a Landlow in eighty eight Is Coming to America.
But then in terms of sort of horror and sci
fi stuff, he was in Chud, he was in Cat People,

(34:08):
He was in Maximum Overdrive with Emilio.

Speaker 2 (34:11):
And several don't we have several Maximum Overdrive people in
this movie?

Speaker 1 (34:14):
Yeah? I guess we do. Yeah. And then for another
Stephen King connection, the Langealiers, he was in that as well,
that TV adaptation.

Speaker 2 (34:21):
Oh maybe we should talk about that on Weird House
if we ever want to watch a four hour movie.

Speaker 1 (34:26):
Oh man, I never saw it. I just I read
though it's novella it's based on, and loved the novella.

Speaker 2 (34:31):
But it is awful. It is, you know, made for
TV Stephen King stuff late nineties, early two thousands, whenever
it was that came out. It has unbelievably bad CGI
monsters and they just run around eating up the screen
like the screen itself.

Speaker 1 (34:46):
They're supposed to be like the Critters, like they're basically
Stephen King wrote The Critters as time munching Kremlin monsters.

Speaker 2 (34:53):
Yeah. My memory about it is that it's about a
cast of people on an airplane who all have their
own demons that get explored in flashbacks. And then also
there are monsters that eat time.

Speaker 1 (35:03):
Oh yeah, I mainly remember the monsters that eat Time
from the again from the novella. Okay, one more bit
player just to mention, and that's this guy John Shay
who plays his character Morgan. I don't know much about
this guy, but his IMDb headshot looks so much like
Jeffrey Epstein. I feel like he's destined for some for
a biopick there. He also played Lex Luthor on Lewis

(35:25):
and Clark you know who Adventure as a Superman.

Speaker 2 (35:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (35:36):
Music wise, the score didn't really do anything for me,
I have to admit, but it's by Trevor Jones, who
scored a lot of eighties films that I love, such
as The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, Time Bandits. In the nineties
he did Dark City. So again, nothing in this picture
really blew me away, but I think his was, particularly
his work in those hints and films was really really good.

Speaker 2 (35:59):
Oh I like it. I like his score on The
Dark Crystal. Yeah, that really help score that driving pace
in the film. In fact, that should come down to someday.
I want to, I don't know, have a good argument
with somebody about which of the Dark City cuts is better,
because did I say Dark Crystal or Dark City earlier?

Speaker 1 (36:16):
For you? I think you said Dark Crystal earlier. Then
you said Dark City, which got me excited because I
had no idea there were different cuts of Dark City
of Dark City, Yeah, that's what. So there's one cut
that is maybe artistically superior because it cuts out some
kind of bad voiceover narration at the beginning and a
few other things. But the original cut has such great pacing,

(36:37):
like it just drives and drives. H. I don't know,
we'll explore it someday. Yeah, yeah, that's that's a fun one.

Speaker 2 (36:45):
But one of the things that I thought was funny
about the music by Trevor Jones. So when you get
to the opening credits of the movie, it is just
cgi shards flying around the screen like an after dark screensaver,
while you've got saxophone music playing a tune that sounds
a little bit like the melody of the reins of
casta Mirror. It's like a cross between rains of Castmer

(37:07):
and then Evangelists and then Baker Street. Okay, And of
course the shards become the title free Jack uh and
and then we immediately cut to swirling fog and silhouettes
of trucks and jeeps cutting through this dark landscape with
their high beams. And then in one of the greatest
transitions in the movie. So you got that, you got
the the music playing and the and the dark trucks

(37:30):
over the horizon, and then immediately estevez butt. You're Joe
Estevez's butt in like his alarm clock's going off. He's
laying in bed.

Speaker 1 (37:39):
Whoa, it's not not what did I say?

Speaker 2 (37:43):
Sorry?

Speaker 1 (37:45):
Different?

Speaker 2 (37:46):
Better? No, this is Emilio Estevez. You just like see
his butt and he's wearing like green underwear, and he's
his alarm clock's going off, and he's like you know,
and his sheets are tossed all over the place.

Speaker 1 (37:57):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (37:57):
And I don't know why I didn't know it first,
why they made that choice to begin with his butt,
but I think it's explained later on once you finally
get all the premise wheeled out.

Speaker 1 (38:07):
Okay, I don't remember the explanation, but yeah, I'll roll
with it. Like the whole opening segment of this section
of this movie, I understand most of the choices they made,
you know, like they want to establish who he is
and what his connections are with people in the past,
and we want we want to have a bone jacking
scenario that is susceptible to disruption. So it but still

(38:32):
you're watching it and you're like, I would just wish
they would go ahead and bone jack this guy so
we can get to the future. It seems like we
spend a lot of time getting to that point.

Speaker 4 (38:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (38:40):
It starts off with Renee Russo and Emilio Estevez just
flirting a lot. It's almost overwhelmingly Sacharin. They're just like
telling each other how much they love each other, and
he's like, I'll win that race, honey, you just watch again.
He's a race car driver and they're talking about like
what will the other driver's wives be wearing? And so
I think they're engaged again. Emilio Estevez playing this guy

(39:05):
Alex Furlong, that's his name for long. He's his Formula
one racer, and and so we're watching all this sweety
sweety time stuff where they're, you know, they're racing around
a track in the daytime, or Emilia Westevez is he's
doing like training laps or something. And then we're cutting
back and forth between that and him flirting with Renee Russo,

(39:27):
and then Mick Jagger and an army of helmeted Apocalypse
goons driving their heavy machinery through the dark and Mick
Jagger is using this futuristic digital map to navigate to
a precise point in New York. And then we get
Renee Russo and Emilia Westevez banter. She's like critiquing his
driving for some reason, and he's like, you drive your typewriter,

(39:50):
I'll drive my car. And then she says it's a computer.
Uh and oh. And then very importantly because it comes
up later in the movie, Emilio says he won't race
unless Renee Russo nibbles his ear in public, and they
kind of hymn and haw about that, and then she does,
and then they say how much they love each other.
So all is well in the Kingdom of nineteen ninety one.

(40:14):
Everybody's happy and in love and things are great.

Speaker 1 (40:16):
Little do they know, though, there is about to be
a catastrophic car wreck. And then that's when the bone
jacking will actually begin.

Speaker 2 (40:23):
Right, the bone jacking will begin.

Speaker 1 (40:25):
Oh.

Speaker 2 (40:25):
But we also we meet Brad the manager. Remember this
is the guy from the New York Dolls. Brad seems
to manage Emilio Estevez and some other racers, and he
says things like, you do the driving, I'll do the jiving,
and so he's going out schmoozing with potential sponsors. I
think there's this guy who introduces himself with the name
of the company. He says like Champion Spark Plugs, and

(40:46):
then Emilio is disrespectful to him and says like, hi,
mister Plugs. And so meanwhile in the dark world, Mick
Jagger and his goons are like rousting a bunch of
post apocalyptic future people out of their their hovels and
setting up a bunch of equipment to do something in
this blasted future hell zone. And then we get mixed

(41:09):
first line, which is just okay, let's do it.

Speaker 1 (41:13):
Yeah. It sets the tone for the rest of the picture,
like it instantly dissolves the magic of him just looking
just you know, being there, grim faced and all in
the cool coat.

Speaker 2 (41:24):
Right. So then Emelio's racing, Alex is driving along, and
Mick Jagger has a bunch of guys getting ready to
do something. They're like guys wearing these reflective foil suits.
And then there's a hacker guy who of course is
wearing sunglasses inside while he's operating a computer. The hacker
guy is named Ripper, and he's got these cool scars
on his face, and they're locking onto a CGI version

(41:48):
of Alex, and then Alex's car flies off course in
the past and it's about to explode in a fireball,
and then zap. Just as the car explodes, Emilio is
time warped into the future and he appears on an
operating table. He's surrounded by the doctors in all the
shiny tin foil body suits. And this seems to be
it's like some kind of mobile surgical center that's inside

(42:11):
a giant truck, which just seems like a bad idea,
like would you be trying to do surgery and like
a truck that's you know, like an all terrain vehicle,
it's bouncing around all over the place.

Speaker 1 (42:20):
But anyway, well, I will I will come to the
picture's defense here and say that this would make sense
in the sence you're jacking somebody's bones out of such
a delicate moment in time. Okay, the timing could be
a little off. And what do you do if they
come through and they have like a head wound or
or some sort of a laceration, like you didn't get
them quite in time. You need to be able to

(42:43):
treat them immediately, So that's my excuse.

Speaker 2 (42:47):
Okay, I buy it. Yeah, I mean it would be
necessary even though it's not ideal. It's just something you
gotta do if you're going to be bone jacking people.
It's the price of bone jacking, right. And so the
doctors do. They're trying to stabilize him. They're pumping in,
you know, doing the CPR and stuff. They get his
heart beating again, but then they realize, oh, no, Emilio
Estevez still has brain function. This is bad because he's

(43:07):
not supposed to. So they're like, grab the lobotomizer, yeah,
which is a blue, glowing electric and noodle that's flopping
around all over the place. And I think what it's
supposed to do is go up his nose and then
dig around a bit and then give him an electric
shock to the brain that will make him complacent or
wipe his brain or something.

Speaker 1 (43:26):
Yeah, it makes no sense at all because he just
have something called like a mind wiper, you know, and
just use that because once you bring in the idea
of lobotomizing, it makes it seem like this brain's not
going to be worth putting somebody else's mind. Jan if
you're gonna if you're gonna screw with it and lobotomize it.
But yeah, it's confusing.

Speaker 2 (43:44):
Good point. But just when they're about to jab his brain,
the Jagger convoy is attacked to people with guns pop
up on rooftops all around. They start blowing stuff up.
This knocks everybody over and Emilio gets loose, and this
is apparently very bad because immediately the doctor in the
tinfoil suits start screaming, free Jack, free Jack, grab him

(44:04):
and this leads to a big fight scene that involves
the lobottomizer where Emilio has to fight them off using
the lobottomizer and he zaps them with it, and eventually
he gets out of the medical truck, but like as
soon as he's trying to escape, he turns back and
then he locks eyes with Mick Jagger, and Mick Jagger
just says, get the mate.

Speaker 1 (44:25):
Yeah. He tells them, yeah, stunners only don't want him damaged.
And I have to say, there are two things in
this movie that I think absolutely three things. Eagleman absolutely works,
Mick Jagger's coat works, and then the Stunners are pretty great.
So these are the rifles, these space age looking rifles
that the Bonejacker Squad has that seem to shoot like

(44:47):
electro plasma pulses and it looks really cool. Like this
is definitely one of the things in the origin, in
the trailer and in the original promotional footage that I
bought into when I was younger, like those guns look
cool and that looks neat they're shooting all these like
blue beams and all. Because even though this film, this
film is essentially cyberpunk, you know, or or cyberpunk made

(45:10):
from cyberpunk derivatives or something, but one of the things
you see in so many visions of the future from
this period, from like the nineties, is that everybody's just
shooting hard ammo. It's just a ballistic you know, worship
gone wild. And at times I watch that stuff and
I'm like, I just I just want to see some
laser beams and some some some phasers and stuff, you know,

(45:33):
like that's I like sci fi guns that shoot of
fancy light beams at things. And so this film at
least really delivers in that category. Well, it has both
because it's the Bonejackers use the light based weapons because
they don't want to damage his body. They just want
to immobilize him so he can be taken to the
what the psychic switchboard or whatever it's called spiritual switch

(45:56):
spiritual switchboard, but the but the but other bad guys
who just want to kill people.

Speaker 2 (46:01):
They use like ballistic weapons.

Speaker 1 (46:03):
Yeah, they don't care about keeping the meat neat right.

Speaker 2 (46:07):
But so here we get a big chase scene. He's
running all over the place. At one point he gets
in a taxi and then gets kicked out of it,
and so Alex is running all over the place, like
he tries to go to Renee Russo's apartment. He's trying
to find people that he used to know because he
somehow doesn't realize that he's in the future. I think
this is a pretty standard accidental time travel or unwitting

(46:28):
time travel trope where the person's like they just won't
accept that the year is different. So they're running around
trying to find things they know where person or a
thing should be there, but it's not.

Speaker 1 (46:38):
And it's like what, yeah, yeah, pretty buy the books.
There's a lot of stuff in this film that is
just by the books, right, this sort of picture.

Speaker 2 (46:46):
But everywhere he goes, people are like, oh my god,
he's a free jack. So everybody knows what this is.
This is a it must be on the news every night.
It's like, you know, today three free jacks were apprehended, and.

Speaker 1 (46:58):
Hey, yeah, how often does this happened? It's enough that
there is a slang for it. Yeah, and everybody's on
the lookout for it. Like I feel like if this
is on the bonejackers for just being kind of sloppy.

Speaker 2 (47:09):
The bonejackers are really they are screwing up a lot.
It sounds like, yeah, and there's this dystopian pa, you know,
like the future totalitarian society has pas everywhere that just
blair stuff at people. So it's going like everybody off
the street, there's a free jacket large anyone on the
street will be fired upon. And then of course we
see the truest sign of dystopia, which is a giant

(47:31):
digital billboard and says welcome to New York Thursday, November
twenty third, two thousand and nine. And then Amelio looks
at it and he's like what. And then there's this
great moment where he pulls out his like race ticket
from his I don't know, from driving earlier that day
to see the date and it says nineteen ninety one,

(47:52):
and it's like it's as if the movie is suggesting
that he was actually thinking, wait, was it two thousand
and nine earlier today? Better check?

Speaker 1 (48:00):
Well, the movie implies, and at times expressly states that
that Emilio Westavez, his character, is not the sharpest knife
in the drawer, right. I think Anthony Hopkins character refers
to him as a dullard at one point. So yes, yeah,
he's uh yeah, he needs to check. He has to
double check to see what year it actually was earlier today.

Speaker 2 (48:21):
So later we meet some corporate creeps. They're like in
a giant elevator that's going up millions of floors, in
a skyscraper that reaches up to the clouds. There they're
in this weird skyscraper that looks like a combination of
an office and a church. It's like the Cathedral of Business,
you know, the Basilica of Saint Dick Fold. And uh

(48:43):
so one of the suits is Jonathan Banks. Again, that's
Mike Irman Trout from Breaking Bad, who we were talking
about earlier. And here we get a bit of exposition dump.
They start explaining that they're they're trying to break the
bad news about the bone jack getting loose and becoming
a free jack to a guy who is wearing a
Ghost of Christmas Yet to come Hood and they're like, sorry, Gramps,

(49:06):
your bone Jack got away. And then they're they're explaining, actually,
we've got even worse news. The spiritual switchboard can only
hold you for another thirty six hours. Shouldn't you consider
an alternative body? And the guy in the Ghost of
Christmas Yet to Come Hood is like, I don't want
an alternative body. I want this one. And then there's
a reveal and it's hologram Emilio Estavez. And here I

(49:30):
think it starts to make sense that the first thing
we see in the movie is Emelio Estavez's butt, because
it seems like the quality of his body in particular,
I guess, including his butt compared to other future bodies
and butts, seems to be relevant to the plot, Like
only that butt will do I guess.

Speaker 1 (49:48):
I wonder what if the other free Jack on hold
they had Joe Estevez. Yeah, and they're they're like, come on,
we got Joe s as ready to go enough. Yeah, Emilio,
it has to be Emilio. I don't want Joe, I
don't want Charlie. I don't I want Martin. It's got
to be Amidia And.

Speaker 2 (50:02):
There's actually another reason for that that we'll get to later.

Speaker 1 (50:05):
Oh.

Speaker 2 (50:05):
But then we get a scene that's a meeting between
Mick Jagger again, he's playing this this mercenary named Victor
visindek with with Jonathan Banks. They like meet up to
scheme together.

Speaker 1 (50:16):
Yeah. So two things about this scene. First of all,
the office set is incredible in this This is one
of several interior sets that are in this movie that
are really cool, Like they just like they went crazy
with art decorating it and like this one has like
this crazy fractured redstone wall behind them, which is really good.
I appreciate that. But then the actual scene, the actual

(50:38):
energy between Mick Jagger and Jonathan Banks, it's just weird,
like and it seems like the casting is so off.
So Jonathan Banks here is playing like the sleazy boss
who owns Faberge eggs. Yeah, and Jagger is playing like
the you know, the the badass warrior with a code,
and it just feels like it should be reverse. Like
mc jagger is the type of guy who owns Faberge eggs.

(51:02):
Jonathan Banks is your mercenary. You know, Jonathan Banks is
great in this anyway, and like, Banks totally delivers. He
knows what he's doing, so he's yeah, he's perfectly fine
in this role. But it feels like you could just
swap these two and you would have been a better place.

Speaker 2 (51:16):
I kind of agree with you there, Yeah, except that
would have given us fewer chances to see Mick Jagger
wearing the Spaceball's helmet.

Speaker 1 (51:22):
True, true, And I don't think it would have saved
the picture in any way. But but yeah, this scene
is pretty great in a dumb way. You got like
basically saying like you were supposed to bone jack that guy,
and it's like I tried. Now he's a free jack.
You're off the case. No, I'm still going to bone
jack that guy. I always bone my jack. Basically.

Speaker 2 (51:42):
Yep, that's pretty much it. He tries to fire him,
and Mick Jagger's like, no, you can't fire me, you know, yeah,
I'll get that meat. A funny thing, Rachel was watching
parts of this with me, and she pointed out that
Mick Jagger's delivery in these scenes is very late season
Sir c lanister.

Speaker 1 (52:01):
Oh, what what do you mean?

Speaker 2 (52:02):
Just the kind of like vindictive cold frown and a
similar delivery. And I don't know. I mean I saw
it when she said it.

Speaker 1 (52:09):
No, no, no, I could I could get that. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
but this is gonna be one of the ultimate like
weird things about Jagger's performance is that what he gives
us here in this scene is not what we get
later on. Like his his performance is just all over
the place, Like he's a cold professional in one scene
and then he'll be something completely different in another.

Speaker 2 (52:31):
Yeah, I can't wait to talk about the scene where
he's like doing hacker tricks on a car on a
wine delivery truck.

Speaker 1 (52:37):
Yeah, he becomes the Riddler out of out of the
later on.

Speaker 2 (52:39):
Yeah. Anyway, Alex ends up taking refuge in a church,
sleeps on the floor in front of the altar, is
ambushed by Amanda Plumber in the form of Sister Shotgun.
She pulls a shotgun on him and and they meet.
They talk about things. She is shocked to learn that
he's a free jack. They argue about this, like she yeah,
she seemed skeptical that he's a free jack, And then

(53:02):
he explains things to her and she eventually ends up
trying to help him, like she's she explains the whole
bone jacking premise. We also get like more exposition dump
from from her and he's like, what, so they were
gonna do a brain transplant on me? And she goes, no,
a mind transplant. So this movie is firmly dualistic, yep.

(53:22):
And then she helps him find the address of somebody
who knows so she sends she arms him with a
gun and sends him off to meet somebody. But then
we should come back to the whole time. We're also
cutting between Emilio Estevez and Mick Jagger, and there's like
a great scene with Mick Jagger hanging out at his
apartment with his buddy.

Speaker 1 (53:41):
Yeah, yeah, his buddy Ripper. And this is another great
interior set with like really strange art on the walls
and it looks lived in, like it was really well done.

Speaker 2 (53:52):
Yeah, there's a red couch backlit white walls with masks
all over them, like a strange rectangular clock, a mountain revolver,
and cutouts from pin up magazines.

Speaker 1 (54:03):
Yeah, yeah, it's strange. I didn't know how to take you.
And I also couldn't tell if like Ripper and Jagger's
character was supposed to be like, like, are they do
they live together here? You know, like I was expecting
like some more development there and then we didn't get it.
So I guess maybe they don't. They just work together,
but because then they just talk about the business of
bone jacking.

Speaker 2 (54:22):
Right exactly. Ripper is played by Issi Morales Junior, who
and he's the hacker who was wearing sunglasses inside earlier.
Oh and we find out Mick Jagger has a lie
detector computer that he tests out on Ripper. And then
I don't recall this ever being used in the film. Again,
it's being set up as if it's like Chekhov's lie
detector machine. Did you did this ever come up?

Speaker 5 (54:43):
Again?

Speaker 1 (54:44):
No, I don't think it did. Another case of kind
of wasted space.

Speaker 2 (54:48):
Totally pointless. Yeah. Yeah, But then the next thing is
really while while Emilio Estevez is traveling to meet his
old manager, Brad, the New York Dolls guy he won
through two thousand and nine New York City, and this
is this is trying to give us some of the
texture of the future.

Speaker 1 (55:05):
Yeah, and it's just your basic eighties Hell City take
on New York City with the sex clubs is a
weird future car transporting chicken cages across town.

Speaker 2 (55:14):
Oh yeah, I like that, But it's also like cheesy
medieval movies like you know, Braveheart or something, and that
anybody who's not a CEO just has dirt smeared on
their face.

Speaker 1 (55:24):
Yep, yep. And then of course we get a street gang,
like a Warrior's Escape from from New York s Street gang,
and it's it's super confusing too, because the gang we
see like, there's this this this African American gentleman, and
he has a helmet on that has both a Confederate
flag and a swastika. They just like threw everything at

(55:46):
the helmet and I have no idea what these guys are,
what their deal is, except they like to shoot guns
in the street.

Speaker 2 (55:52):
I don't think it makes any sense. It's sort of
an unspoken convention of dystopian hell city sci fi that
the people of the future use the political symbols of
the past with no particular meaning or coherence, which, in
a way I think about it, that's I think the
current kind of true. Over time people just use symbols
of the past with clearly without understanding what they mean

(56:13):
at all.

Speaker 1 (56:14):
But ultimately these this is this is just action. He's
moving through anyway to get from point A to point B.

Speaker 2 (56:19):
Right. So Alex meets up with Brad, and Brad's like, oh, wow,
you're a bone jack or I mean, you're a free jacket.
So they're hanging out, and I love how they're in
Brad's apartment and people. You just hear people constantly getting
shot and screaming outside the window. Sounds like the future.
The wars out in the streets never stop. Yeah, And

(56:40):
Emilio Estevez is like, well, why me, Why why do
they need my bones? Why am I the bone jack?
Why can't they just take somebody else's body?

Speaker 1 (56:48):
And oh yeah, because that's a great point that you
don't think about until this point exactly.

Speaker 2 (56:54):
And Brad's like, well, the answer is obvious. You're clean.
You're from the past, so you haven't been exposed to
all of the pollution and drugs that have ruined everybody
else's body in the future. Plus everybody who's alive today
has been living for years without an ozone layer.

Speaker 1 (57:09):
So yeah, the ozone layer is gone. So this makes
me wonder is this part of the pre Highlander two chronology?
Oh yeah, because it's set in what twenty twenty four,
So I think you could line up.

Speaker 2 (57:19):
This movie has a lot in common with Highlander two.

Speaker 1 (57:21):
Actually, yeah, not as good, not as good as that is.

Speaker 2 (57:25):
Good. Well, I would say, actually it's better than Highlander two,
but Highlander two is better to watch.

Speaker 1 (57:32):
Yeah, well, I don't know. I think I would say
it's better than Highlander two.

Speaker 2 (57:35):
But you mean you'll say Highlander two is better.

Speaker 1 (57:38):
Highland two is a better film, okay, and also a
better viewing experience. But then anyway, it's still fun.

Speaker 2 (57:45):
It's so.

Speaker 1 (57:46):
Yeah, we continue moving through the city here, even more
dystopia cyberpunk tropes are rolled out. You know, big business
controls everything. Japanese businesses have this superiority, environmental disaster, future drugs,
bodies for sale, immortality for the rich. It's just checking
off all the boxes.

Speaker 2 (58:03):
It's all there. Yeah, And like every other sci fi
movie from the late eighties and early nineties, it assumes
that Japanese corporations are soon to take over the United States.

Speaker 1 (58:12):
Yeah everything.

Speaker 2 (58:13):
Yeah, and so the Japanese business panic is which actually
was in Diehard too, I seen, oh.

Speaker 1 (58:19):
Yeah, was it? Okay.

Speaker 2 (58:21):
It's a pervasive assumption of the movies of the time, you.

Speaker 1 (58:24):
Know, speaking of cyberpunk, I've been playing the Cyberpunk twenty
seventy seven game. Oh really, Yeah, And that's one of
the interesting things to engage in with it is to
think about, like, this is a very it's a very
nineteen eighties vision of the future that really doesn't match
up in many ways with sort of modern sensibilities and all.
And yeah, you have all that stuff like the like

(58:45):
Japanese business panic that are a part of it, and yeah,
it's it's it's weird to think about.

Speaker 2 (58:51):
Well, that panic plays into the first scene where we
meet Renee Russo of two thousand and nine, who I
will say looks exactly the same as she did in
nineteen ninety one. He literally does not look like she
has aged a day, So I guess maybe she has
not been exposed to the sky without ozone or something
that's ruined everybody else his body in the future. But
she is now a high powered executive at this corporation

(59:14):
called McCandless, which is the biggest, most powerful corporation in
the world, and she is colleagues with Jonathan Banks, with
this guy Michellet, and Renee Russo is doing some top
level negotiation in Japanese with these representatives from a Japanese
corporation and the executives across the table. Eventually, after they
negotiate their like the mineral rights are yours and the

(59:39):
CEO of the McCandless Corporation is Ian McCandless, played by
Anthony Hopkins, and he video calls Renee Russo he's like,
congratulations on business, now do more business now.

Speaker 1 (59:51):
I don't recall, do we know McCandless is actually dead
and that he's the patron looking to get inside his
bone Jack body.

Speaker 2 (59:58):
So technically no, that is a real spoiler that is
revealed at the end of the movie that the person
looking for Emilio Estevez's bone Jack body is actually Anthony Hopkins.
But you are not supposed to know it at this point.
You're supposed to think he's still alive and just communicating
with her through video phone calls. But no, it's absolutely obvious.

(01:00:19):
I had never seen the movie before and I was like, Okay,
Anthony Hopkins is the person who needs the Stavez body.

Speaker 1 (01:00:26):
Okay. See, I couldn't remember if like the trailer spoiled
it for me or marketing material back in the early nineties.
But I feel like I always knew, like there was
never a twist here for me.

Speaker 5 (01:00:35):
Yeah, it's it's a thousand percent obvious.

Speaker 2 (01:00:46):
So then you're back to Brad and Alex walking around.
They're trying to find Renee Russo. Brad's trying to help
him find her because it's like, oh, once you know
she sees you, she'll she'll help you. And so Brad
takes Alex to a diner where for some reason, people
start pointing guns at each other. And then you find
out it's a double cross because Brad told told Alex

(01:01:10):
that he was gonna help him fire the Renee Russo,
but instead he just calls up the police to collect
the bounty on his old friend.

Speaker 1 (01:01:16):
Yeah, and again, this is a whole section of the
movie that takes way longer than it needs to.

Speaker 2 (01:01:20):
Yes, and this turns into a car chase Emelio Estevez
driving a police motorcycle around, driving through restaurant kitchens. I
see some familiar Atlanta streets in the scene, and eventually
Alex like crashes through a checkpoint and we get to
see some of the roads and stuff. But he's going
to Renee Russo's apartment.

Speaker 1 (01:01:40):
I have to say, I like they have a mix,
an appropriate mix of some old looking conventional cars, but
then also some snazzy future cars. Not flying cars, road
based cars, but futuristic in appearance.

Speaker 2 (01:01:51):
Most of the cars, or at least the nice looking
cars in the future, are covered by some kind of
single piece fiberglass carapace.

Speaker 1 (01:01:58):
Yeah, which seems like a good solution. You know, you
don't have to completely redesign your space cars from the
ground up. Just get some sort of sleek body to
put on top of it, and you know, it ends
up looking pretty good.

Speaker 2 (01:02:10):
It's just a Honda Civic with a big one piece
top on it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:02:13):
Yeah, they're essentially parade floats, right.

Speaker 2 (01:02:16):
Also, the horses and carriages in the future, there's lots
of horses and carriages all over the place.

Speaker 1 (01:02:20):
Huh okay, yeah, I forgot about that.

Speaker 2 (01:02:23):
But Alex goes to Julie's apartment, Julia's renee Russo he
breaks in. He's like, hey, I'm here. I got bone jacked,
you know, but now I'm a free jack. And they argue,
let's pick up exactly where we left. Yeah. Yeah, So,
I don't know, seventeen years or something have passed for
her it's been I haven't done the math, right whatever.
Some number of years have passed, and he's just like, hey,
you know, how are things and she's she freaks out.

(01:02:45):
She doesn't think it's really him. She thinks that somebody
else has bonejacked his body and is now trying to
trick her.

Speaker 1 (01:02:52):
I want to see a remake where the Renee Russo
character is totally not into this and she's like talking
to her husband or partner and he's like, yeah, God,
my ex boyfriend from seventeen years ago turns out he's
a free jack. Won't leave me alone. I've told him
like that was seventeen years ago. Like, life moves on.
I'm sorry you went through this, but I cannot help you.

Speaker 2 (01:03:14):
Right, I've got the end of it. I'm an executive
at McCandleis. I don't have time for this.

Speaker 1 (01:03:19):
Yeah like you, Yeah, you were a mistake seventeen years ago,
and I really am not about to pick that same
mistake up and run through the streets with it.

Speaker 2 (01:03:26):
That would have been an amazing direction, but no. Instead,
she's just like single and at first she's skeptical, but
you know what's gonna happen. Come on, Yeah, and then
this turns into a car chase. Mick Jagger like finds
Emelia Estevez at her apartment and then he starts chasing
him down in this red land boat that is just hilarious.
But Alex hijacks a truck full I think it's like

(01:03:49):
a wine bottle delivery truck. It's full of these neon
green bottles of wine. So they do a car chase
around we see a Marta station and then there's one
of my favorite parts of the movie that was really
funny was when I have to.

Speaker 1 (01:04:03):
Say, real quick though, I have to say about that
wine vehicle. Yeah, I'm watching it this time. I instantly
thought of Amy Sedaris's regional wine lady Ronnie Vino from
her television series At Home with Amy Siderius. And I
don't know what she drives. She's this hilarious character that
goes door to door selling wines. But like, this has

(01:04:24):
to be Ronnie Vino's vehicle. It is stolen here.

Speaker 2 (01:04:28):
Well I have to check that out. But anyway, I
thought the scene was funny for multiple reasons. Number one
is that, yeah, I understand Alex. Forlong our protagonist is
supposed to be a race car driver, so it makes
sense that he would have some skills at evading these
mercenaries no matter what he was driving, But still it
seems implausible. He's just fully out maneuvering a fleet of

(01:04:49):
police interceptor vehicles and these like mercenary motorcycles and stuff
in a delivery truck for like full of you know,
Neon Green Pole mass On.

Speaker 1 (01:04:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:05:00):
Oh, and it's got a laptop inside the cab where
he's driving that Mick Jagger keeps coming on, like popping
up on the screen on the laptop and harassing him
while he's driving and saying like, you can't get rid
of me that easily, And he'll try to close the
laptop and then it'll just open up automatically and Mick
Jaggery jaggers and laughing at him.

Speaker 1 (01:05:19):
Yeah again he suddenly his character is suddenly the Riddler
or something. You know, it's like a complete shift from
what it was earlier.

Speaker 2 (01:05:25):
And the mercenaries who worked for Mick Jagger, they're all
dressed like spaceballs once again. Eventually, Furlong escapes this scene
by jumping off of a bridge into water from a
height that would absolutely have killed him. He drifts down
the river, I guess, and he ends up. He ends
up washing up on a dock somewhere and he meets
Frankie Faison, who we mentioned earlier, who's just hanging out

(01:05:46):
at a dock next to all this toxic water and
he's eating something. He tries to share his food, I think,
but he's like, yeah, this is a sauteed river rat.
And then they have a fantastic conversation about the best
way to cook river rats. And then this goes into
this monologue about an eagle that really doesn't make any sense,
but I would say acting prize for the movie goes
to Frankie Faison.

Speaker 1 (01:06:08):
Well, and it works too, because the kind of monologue
you'd expect to get from like a crazy person, you know,
that lives under a bridge in the in a dystopian future,
Like it shouldn't make sense. It should it should have
this sort of raw energy to it that's kind of
muddled by strange thinking, and it totally shines through. It's
it is the best scene in the whole picture.

Speaker 2 (01:06:29):
It's like simultaneously incoherent and wise.

Speaker 1 (01:06:32):
Yes, yeah, And in that very sagely you're like, I
don't know what he just said, but I think it
was really important, and I will I will buy him.
It's the same trick that shaman throughout history have used,
and Eagle Guy has no exception.

Speaker 2 (01:06:45):
Yeah, but anyway, so we come back to Renee Russo
and her colleague Boone, who again this is Grandel Bush.
They go looking for Alex and the slums and they
sort of make up, right Rene, So it's like if
I'd known it was really you, and so they're happy
now again together. She believes it's really him and she's

(01:07:08):
going to help him free Jack. She's going to help
him escape somehow, and her plan is, oh, and they
see a digital billboard that's like, oh, the bounty on
him is now ten million dollars. But the plan is
that she's going to meet up with a fancy friend
of hers named Morgan at the most slicely canteena of
two thousand and nine New York. It's like, you know

(01:07:29):
very much. New York's hottest club is free Jack. And
so they go there and she's going to go meet
her friend who apparently helps people escape. I don't know
why she knows a guy who just helps Free Jack's escape,
but she does. And meanwhile, Emilio Estevez is just sitting
by himself at the bar. He drinks something that the
bartender gives him and this like messes up his brain.

(01:07:51):
And then Mick Jagger's real life wife at the time
of this film, or at least his partner, I think
their marriage was later annulled. Her name's Jerry Hall. She
is also in the movie, and she shows up as
a TV interviewer who like walks up to Emelio Estevez
and is like, Hey, what's going on? And then they
realize like, oh, this is that free jack everybody's looking for,

(01:08:13):
and they put him on live TV and he starts
quoting Arnold Schwarzenegger from The Terminator.

Speaker 1 (01:08:18):
Yeah, it's actually pretty great, you know, because they just
went ahead and had the Furlong character just get totally wasted,
like he's a kind of a dumb dumb and this
expresses it, you know. He just he drinks too much
of this bar. He's out of it, and he's just
starts gabbing to the journalists here and she's like, roll it,
We're gonna get the ratings tonight. So I actually kind

(01:08:40):
of like this scene.

Speaker 2 (01:08:41):
Weird connection is that. So she was I think married
to Mick Jagger, at the time, but Jerry Hall is
now married to Rupert Murdoch. Yes, that Murdock.

Speaker 1 (01:08:52):
Wasn't she also in Batman? Wasn't she the model character
that Jack Nicholson's Joker scars with acid? I think she?

Speaker 2 (01:09:00):
Oh, I don't remember that.

Speaker 1 (01:09:01):
Yeah, yeah, I think she popped up in a number
of films during that period. All right, So from here
we go to Morgan's apartment and once again, once again
some great interior decorating.

Speaker 2 (01:09:11):
Yes, giant foot art. He just has these like twenty
foot tall feet sculptures in his house.

Speaker 1 (01:09:18):
Yeah, very cool. Yeah, and I really think we should
credit where credits due. First of all, for mc jagger's coat.
Lisa Jensen was costume designer on this film, and then
art direction for the film was James A. Taylor, Set
direction by Bruce A. Gibson. So really, without this bunch,
I'm not sure what we would be looking at in
these scenes.

Speaker 2 (01:09:37):
I agree. So I think they're just negotiating like that
they're going to get him out of there, like Morgan's
gonna arrange for him to escape somewhere. And then and
then there's a love scene of course, Emilio Estevez and
Rene Russo they they're you know, they slip into something
more comfortable and there's some saxophone playing in the background
and you get all that.

Speaker 1 (01:09:56):
Yeah, but again, more just wasted space in this film,
like this previous scene wasted space. Then there's this, and yeah, I.

Speaker 2 (01:10:03):
Could really trim this down. Yeah, there is something that's
utterly inconsequential to the rest of the film, but a
good B plot scene where Amanda Plumber just kicks Jonathan
Banks in the testes. Yeah, and they really milk it,
like he does the classic sinking to the floor, moaning
with his eyes rolling back kind of thing.

Speaker 1 (01:10:20):
Yeah. It accomplishes nothing though for the plot or for
these characters, Like I don't really know why we bothered
with this.

Speaker 2 (01:10:27):
So Emilio Estevez is getting ready to escape. He's going
to a boat and he's going with Boone I remember
Grandel Marsha And they're walking together and Boone is explaining
that he has become a people to the city, like
he inspires everyone because he has a free jack and
the people are like, wow, I guess if he could
be free, I could be free too or something.

Speaker 1 (01:10:48):
Yeah. It's a little flimsy, but clearly they had to
establish why Boone would help him. Yeah, if there's ten million,
and I think it's supposedly more. At this point, it
keeps going up, like there's a tremendous amount of money
on the table for the guy. Why are you helping him?
And he says, well, you inspire my grandma.

Speaker 2 (01:11:03):
Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 1 (01:11:04):
Yeah, And I'm like, okay, I'll buy it. I'm not
happy if.

Speaker 2 (01:11:08):
By my grandma loves you.

Speaker 1 (01:11:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:11:11):
So they're supposed to go get on a boat, but
then bam, boat explodes. It's a Jagger ambush, and then
it's a double double cross because Jagger is trying to
capture Furlong alive. But then these other dudes show up
and start shooting at Mick Jagger and shooting at Emilio Estevez,
and I think Boone is like, those aren't bone jackers.
There's someone else in the area, and so they're all

(01:11:33):
they're all running around. You find out Boone has a
katana and he's like a total badass and he fights people.

Speaker 1 (01:11:40):
Yeah. I mean basically, you have Jagger's bunch wants to
finish the bone jacking contract, and then Jonathan Banks's bunch
they don't want the bone jacking to take place because
they don't want Anthony Hopkins to get his new body
because then he's still in charge of the company if
that happens. Yeah, we don't really learn that till later,
but that's why we're building up too.

Speaker 2 (01:11:56):
That's right. We find that out from Jonathan Banks and
a big another exposition dumb scene. But everybody's running around chasing,
shooting at each other. There's a big fight scene between
Emilio Estevez and a large, strong bone jacker who gets electrocuted.
During this whole sequence, Mick Jagger is creeping around in
a hilarious helmet. But then there's a scene where Furlong

(01:12:17):
has a chance to kill Mick Jagger, but he doesn't.
He lets him live. He spares his life, and for
this Mick Jagger, Mick Jagger gives him a head start.
He's like, I'll let you escape because I'm a man
of honor. You're a man of honor. And he starts counting,
and Mick Jagger says, one Mississippi, two Mississippi.

Speaker 1 (01:12:38):
I mean this ridiculous. Yeah, that's just ridiculous. It's way
too much of a lead too, Like why you just
spend like they established it's gonna take costs like millions
and millions of dollars to catch this guy again. You've
got him, but you're like, no, I'm a man of
my honor. I'm gonna let you get away again.

Speaker 2 (01:12:54):
Right, So they eventually they go back to mccandles's headquarters.
He meets back up with Renever, so they go to
McCandless headquarters to meet with Jonathan Banks and have Jonathan
Banks explain the whole plot. Yep, and Renee Russo and
Emilio Estevez end up end up going up to the
Spiritual Switchboard to find you know, there's a number of

(01:13:16):
double crosses yet again, and people trying to kill each other.
So they end up a the Spiritual Switchboard, which looks
like a smoother version of the Satan powered Hyperdrive and
event Horizon.

Speaker 1 (01:13:26):
Yeah, it's you know, clearly whatever is happening here, it
can only take place at the top of a high
rise in Manhattan aka Atlanta, And yeah, it raises a
lot of questions, like, I guess the big one is
what if we are actually dealing with spirit Like what
if this film is presenting a future in which which

(01:13:48):
there is a spiritual reality to the individual, and that's
why you have some sort of crazy contraption, because there's
like an actual ghost soul, you know, like there's an
Anthony Hopkins poltergeist trapped in this thing and they have
to eventually try and slam it into some new meat.

Speaker 2 (01:14:03):
Yeah, it really does explore some Cartesian territory.

Speaker 1 (01:14:06):
I think.

Speaker 2 (01:14:08):
I think you can give its it's philosophical credit, especially
because so they go up to the Spiritual Switchboard and
they meet McCandleis that's Anthony Hopkins, and he's full on
lawnmower Man beyond cyberspace. He's just hanging out in digital
worlds with digital diamonds. Our heroes are transported to a
giant VR castle inside what looks like a Utah desert,

(01:14:31):
and Anthony Hopkins says, welcome to my mind. And Anthony
Hopkins has been faking being alive through video simulation the
whole time. We find out that he's in love with
Rene Russo and he wants Amelio Estevez's body so that
she would love him in return. And so they're trying
to do the mind transfer on this big thing that

(01:14:53):
looks exactly like a jack, like it's a spike with
these balls coming out of the middle of it, and
the jack opens up and there's a big crit stole
inside it, so it's literally crystal energy.

Speaker 1 (01:15:03):
Now the film does get very briefly and just into
the philosophy or another. The philosophy really, I guess you
would say the ethics of bone jacking, which is kind
of interesting because you know, he's like they bring up
the point which I mostly agree with here, like he
was gonna Emlio wes Vez's character was going to die.
That was going to happen, and they can't really interfere

(01:15:25):
with that, like that would be that would really mess up,
you know, the entire time stream. All they can do
is steal his body and then do something with it.
And it's just an accident that he got free and
that he's escaped. So to a certain extent, bone jacking
is a victimist crime.

Speaker 2 (01:15:43):
Oh you think so, huh, you're a pro bone jacking,
are you?

Speaker 1 (01:15:47):
Well, I'm I'm I'm not in I guess I'm not
entirely pro bone jacking. I mean it does symbolize, you know,
the a great deal of unbalanced privilege in the future
for the few individuals who can afford immortality, which you know,
we still see plenty of science fiction that deals with that,
because that's ultimately a that's a reality we're potentially facing.
You know, these longevity science improves, you know, who's going

(01:16:11):
to be able to afford it? Who gets to have
their life span extended? Who gets to live forever? You know? Sure,
so it gets into some of that territory and that
is that is some rich sci fi territory to explore,
and they briefly do it.

Speaker 2 (01:16:24):
Yeah, as sort of they kind of half address it.
There is a line where Amelio Estevez says to Anthony Hopkins,
you don't need a new body, you need a new soul.

Speaker 1 (01:16:37):
Yeah, and he's like, yeah, whatever, meat, Ye prepare.

Speaker 2 (01:16:41):
To have me in your meat. And then there's a
psychedelic mind transfer scene, but it doesn't complete because Jonathan
Banks shows up to kill everybody. I guess because oh,
because he just wants Anthony Hopkins to die so that
he can take over the business.

Speaker 1 (01:16:57):
Right. He needs this to fail, and he's been trying
to make it fail the whole and then the last
thing he's going to try is just shooting the crystal,
which he does, but then he shot himself.

Speaker 4 (01:17:05):
No.

Speaker 2 (01:17:05):
I think Renee Russo she shoots.

Speaker 1 (01:17:07):
Why does she have a gun?

Speaker 2 (01:17:08):
She gets a gun something, she shoots the crystal stops
the transfer, and then there's a question. So Emilio Estevez
is there and it's like, uh, is Anthony Hopkins mind
in him or is it still his mind? And there's
a standoff with Mick Jagger and Jonathan Banks with their
all point and guns at each other and they're all
trying to figure out is that really Anthony Hopkins or not?
And they're going to kill him if it's if it's

(01:17:30):
still Amelio Estevez, but Jagger's gonna let him live if
it's Anthony Hopkins. And uh, so they do a trick.
They're like, what's your personal identification number? And Emilio Estevez
starts saying numbers and Mick Jagger's like that's right, and
so they they shoot Jonathan Banks. But then you find
out there's a very sweet ending where for a moment

(01:17:50):
you are supposed to think, oh, maybe it did complete
and the bad guy won. Anthony Hopkins is now in
the meat. But there is a sweet ending where Renee
Russ and Emilio estevezer driving off and Mick Jagger comes
up to them and like leans into the car window
and is like, hey, you know, I know that number
you gave was wrong, but I decided to let you

(01:18:10):
live because you're a stand up guy or something.

Speaker 1 (01:18:13):
Yeah, it's I mean, it's not a bad ending. I
like the whole mystery of it, like did it work?
Did it not work? And it's like a kind of
a fun double cross ultimately a face turn for Mick
Jagger's character. But it does take a long time to
get to this point in the picture.

Speaker 2 (01:18:29):
It does, and it strikes me as like that would
be a cool thing in the future, if there's some
kind of like a prestige attached to the idea of
being original meat. You say like, no, no, no, my mind
is still in the meat that it was originally and
this is not new meat.

Speaker 1 (01:18:42):
Well, you know, I mentioned the nineties Outer Limit series earlier.
This whole film would have made a really solid forty
five minute nineties Outer Limit episode. Yes, Instead, it's like
twice that length, and I think that's the one of
the problems here.

Speaker 2 (01:18:57):
There is a really funny rock song that plays over
the end credits. I had to look this up. It's
by The Scorpions and it's called Solid. It's called hit
between the eyes, and the lyrics include lines like late
at night, when you're all alone, take a ride to
the danger zone.

Speaker 1 (01:19:16):
Yeah, but that's it.

Speaker 2 (01:19:18):
As we've been saying, I think this movie's pretty awful.
It has some real pleasures in terms of ridiculous dialog
and shots of Mick Jagger looking really funny in certain costumes.
I think it would be better if it was like
thirty to forty minutes Shorter leaned harder into the absurdity.
It could sort of veer into camp classic if it
were like that. As it is, it's kind of an

(01:19:39):
uncut gem.

Speaker 1 (01:19:41):
It would have been nate if the first time Emilio's
character jumps off the bridge and you say, oh, that
would have killed the normal person. What if he does
die and he's immediately bonejacked again?

Speaker 2 (01:19:50):
Bone jack to a second future. This time it's twenty twenty.
Things are even worse.

Speaker 1 (01:19:56):
Yeah, yeah, with all your points there, Oh, here's my
casting workaround. Okay, that could have improved things. Okay. Grand
Al Bush plays our hero Alex Furlong, Okay, yeah. Amanda
Plumber plays Julie Redland, the love interest.

Speaker 2 (01:20:14):
Okay, nice, Yeah, she's a exec at McCandless.

Speaker 1 (01:20:18):
Yeah, Yeah, Jonathan Banks and Mick Jagger switch role, so
Banks as Vicendek and Jagger as Michellette.

Speaker 2 (01:20:25):
The corporate guy with Faberge eggs.

Speaker 1 (01:20:27):
Yeah, Frankie still plays the Eagle guy, but in a
far expanded role. I don't know how they just get
more screen time for that.

Speaker 2 (01:20:35):
Care he should become like the full on Obi wan
Kenobi of the movie. He's just like throughout the whole
thing is like this sort of the guy to character.

Speaker 1 (01:20:42):
Yeah, Anthony Hopkins remains mccandle's because he's fine in that,
and then the rest just fill in as needed. I
don't know. Emilio can play somebody. Yeah, Buster pointe exer
can do whatever. But I feel like, get the weirder actors,
the more interesting actors up towards the top, That's what
I want, and Smick Jagger more appropriately get the meat.

(01:21:05):
All right, Well, if you want to get the meat.
Lucky for you, again, this was a thirty million dollar picture,
so you can rent it or buy it everywhere. It's
it's not as like streamable as part of a service
as you might expect, you know, in terms of like
Netflix and Amazon Prime and all, but you can absolutely
buy it or rent it anywhere. It's even available on
Blu Ray for crying out loud.

Speaker 2 (01:21:24):
I wonder if the Blu Ray has the same menus.
My god, Blu Ray made in like twenty fourteen or
something still has the page just for the url of
Morgan Creek.

Speaker 1 (01:21:34):
I bet it has like just a loveless, like film
studio template. Like whatever everything else had that came out
that wasn't didn't have like a cult following or you know,
wasn't a huge hit. It just gets the same treatment
as everything else.

Speaker 2 (01:21:47):
Hey, everybody right in about your favorite DVD menus. What's
the worst DVD menu you've ever found that? What's the
most absurd dedication of an entire menu option you've ever found?

Speaker 1 (01:22:01):
Yeah, the most over ambitious animation from swishing from one
page to the next. Yeah, I'd love to hear about it.
Or oh god, some of these, especially some of the
kids DVDs from back in the day, they would have
games like really, oh god, like really rough attempts to
have some sort of a click based game on the DVD.
It was rough.

Speaker 2 (01:22:20):
Sometimes they got Easter eggs, you remember those, where like
you'd move the cursor around to a thing that you
didn't realize you could move it to and then it
would play a hidden scene or something.

Speaker 1 (01:22:29):
Yeah. Oh man, I hope there's still I do love
hidden tracks and Easter eggs and stuff, and I hope
some of that's still going on. All right, Well, we're
gonna go ahead and close it out here. But yeah,
this was free Jack. We hope you enjoyed it. Again.
There was a little bit of weirdness in this one,
maybe not as weird as some of the other pictures,
but still was a lot of fun to talk about,

(01:22:50):
and I think it is important to just talk about
sometimes these these big budget films which can sometimes turn
out pretty weird but also can just really fail to
set the world on fire. All right, Well, if you
want to watch more episodes of weird Ouse Cinema, you
can catch it every Friday in the Stuff to Blow
your Mind podcast feed, and you can find that podcast

(01:23:11):
feed wherever you get your podcasts, wherever that happens to be.
Just rate, review, and subscribe if you have the ability
to do so.

Speaker 2 (01:23:18):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch
with us with feedback on this episode or any other
to suggest a topic for the future, just to say hello.
You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.

Speaker 3 (01:23:39):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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