Freelance review – John Cena and Alison Brie battle stereotypes in crude action-comedy

Taken director Pierre Morel gets it really, really wrong with this dumb, crude and not remotely entertaining action-comedy. The idea isn’t too bad: it’s about a former US special forces soldier who gets caught up in a South American coup after being hired as bodyguard to a journalist. You can picture Armando Iannucci running with the satirical possibilities, or a more serious-minded film-maker wading knee-deep into moral murk, John le Carré style. Instead, Morel, working with a script by Jacob Lentz, squanders the basic concept – not to mention the gym time that wrestler-turned-actor John Cena put in to get the upper body of a Greek god.

Cena plays Mason Pettits, a military veteran struggling with post-army life and bored of his going-nowhere new career as a lawyer. (The mug on his desk offers the only laugh of the movie: “Relax, I’m a badass lawyer.”) So it doesn’t take much to persuade him to fly to fictional Paldonia, where his client is Claire Wellington (Alison Brie). She’s an ambitious journalist – look at that trouser suit! – who has landed the scoop of the century: a one-to-one with dictator General Venegas (Juan Pablo Raba). He’s less a character and more a collection of tired stereotypes, with his white suit, whiter teeth, and grandiose pronouncements about himself in the third person. But the real villains turn out to be greedy global corporations flexing their muscles behind the scenes in Paldonia, a country rich in natural resources.

It’s idiotic nonsense packed with boring chases through the jungle. Mason and Claire dodge South African mercenaries in jeeps lobbing hand grenades and shooting bazookas. Brie and Cena look lifeless and blank-faced; they’ve got no chemistry, and the objectionable dynamics of him manfully rescuing her shrieking from the clutches of the bad guys on repeat feel like a satire of the genre – which this isn’t.

• Freelance is released on 1 January on digital platforms