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Freerunner
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray A - America - Image Entertainment Review written by and copyright: Ethan Stevenson (7th January 2012). |
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The Film
 Every once in a while a film comes along that makes me want to completely reevaluate every score I’ve ever given. To rethink every review I’ve ever written. Sometimes it’s because the movie I’m currently watching, the one that’s causing the pondering, is so special, unique, wonderful and well made that the benchmark has suddenly and perhaps unfairly risen and nearly everything before it kind of gets reshuffled, lower, in the deck. Other times, it’s because a film is so unspeakably bad, even mediocrity would sate and cleanse my palate. And suddenly I wouldn’t mind watching that movie I gave a “C” to again, meaning maybe I should have given it a better grade the first time around? Was I too hard on blank, I wonder? Or too lenient on blah? But, usually, those thoughts fritter away soon enough, easily forgotten musings as I move on, dusting off another film and placing it into my player. And then plugging words into semblances we call sentences, forging paragraphs and forming a Word document into pages of useless, blabbering bloated criticisms I can then pass off as a review. That brief moment of questioning pushed back into the recesses of my mind to never really bother again. And then something like “Freerunner” comes across my screen and I really don’t know what to make of it because, honestly, if this is what passes for a movie, then like Professor Farnsworth listening to a room full of evolution deniers, I don’t want to live on this planet anymore. “Freerunner” is a special kind of awful. An awful that doesn’t just make me contemplate the very nature of our scoring system—if “Freerunner” is an “F”, the lowest of the low, everything else by default is at least a “C-”—but also seemingly stuns me into wondering which way is up. “Freerunner” is so unspeakably bad—mind numbingly, shockingly, appallingly awful—that it’s made me want to question the very fiber of my being. To discuss the plot of “Freerunner” would suggest that it actually has one. And, frankly, aside from a few tattered, confusingly constructed, scenes of inconsequential exposition at the beginning—something about a crazy game where idiots run up-ways, down-ways, sideways and every-ways across an unnamed city, and that sometimes people win this game and win money, and people across the globe watch the games on a fake version of Youtube—it really doesn’t. Nor does “Freerunner” have characters. Quite odd considering the film has three credited screenwriters—Matthew Chadwick, Raimund Huber and Jeremy Sklar—and a cast of D-listers all failing to fill roles with resonance. I mean sure, there’s a protagonist played by non-acting actor Sean Farris. A villainous businessman (Danny Dyer) who rigs the game, placing bombs around the players necks to spice things up for his gaggle of gloriously offensive, ridiculously rich, racial stereotype colleagues who bet on the winner in each years championship of rich-guy money-wastery. And the “stakes”—as the movie execs would probably ask about had anyone bothered to approach an exec to ask for a budget (I know neither happened because this was independently made for an insignificant amount of money; a fact made plainly obvious by the poor production values)—are as clear as crystal. If Farris and the other players don’t navigate the maze of the nondescript cityscape in the remainder of the film’s 88-minute runtime, they’ll blow up, simple as that. The protagonist has a girlfriend and he wants to win, take the money and run away to some tropical beach with her. The girl is played by Rebecca Da Costa, who has what could be considered a unique mastery of the English language and the art of line delivery, best comparable perhaps to the awesomely awful Mr. Tommy Wiseau. It’s all bullshit and, yes Mark, someone does hit her. Equal parts “Running Man” (1987), “The Most Dangerous Game” 1932), the "Hunger Games" trilogy (forthcoming in 2012-2015), “Death Race 2000” (1975) and filled out by all kinds of absurd ridiculousness (even more ridiculous absurdity than those other books and films ask you to permit, which can be quite a lot), “Freerunner” is set apart from the pack with a conceit that makes it special: the plot is all just an excuse to show off the strange sport of Parkour. That free running, body twisting, insanity popularized by the jaw dropping chase through a Madagascarian construction site in “Casino Royale” (2006), and Luc Besson’s cultish “District B-13” movies (2004-2009), and even a segment on “Top Gear” where the slowest man in Britain races a duo of wall-hopping hoodlums around Liverpool in a Peugeot. Let me make one thing clear. If the Parkour in “Freerunner” were good—or if the film had even one other redeemable quality—it might be worth something more than nothing, like the "B-13" movies, which are bad, but watchable. Sadly, no. "Freerunner" freerunning Parkour isn't good. At least I don't think, but I can't really tell (more on that in a minute). And the acting is atrociously atrocious (how’s that for meta). Even Dyer takes an awkward, laughable turn as the cigar chomping game runner Mr. Frank. And most everyone else is somewhere between hopeless and zombie, giving bland, soulless, dead eyed, corpsified readings at the camera. Not to the audience or the incompetent director behind said camera, or even TO the camera, but simply AT it. And when the inept direction by Lawerance Silverstein combines with the franticly frenetic editing style that would make even Michael Bay blush, all filtered through the uncomfortably grainy gimmicky shakycam cinematography by Claudio Chea… just looking at their “film” makes one want to vomit. Not because of the nauseating images splashed on screen at 60-mega-cuts per second (or at least not only). But simply because there is no other proper response to what you’re watching—the awfulness of everything that is this movie—than to puke up all over the place. And honestly, vomiting is an improvement. Those moments, when your head is ducked down, and you’ve bent into an uncomfortable position heaving between your legs, will be a much better alternative than having to constantly look at this thing they’ve called “Freerunner”. As to whether or not the Parkour is well done, or fascinating to watch, is immaterial. First of all, the editing and poor camerawork makes it impossible to actually see any of the stunts anyway. Secondly, the film offers nothing that hasn’t been done better elsewhere in terms of the radical free running craziness. And as an example of the filmic form, “Freerunner” is simply an icon of incompetence. Literally nothing is done right in movie-making terms: the characters are undefined blobs of boring that simply push the action forward, the direction of said action is tactless and frankly incoherent, and the plot-less script is pointless and a waste of the paper it was, I assume, at one point printed on. There’s absolutely nothing redeemable about “Freerunner”, in anyway, as a film. And no one should ever, ever watch it. Well, no, I take that back as my last statement isn’t exactly true. “Freerunner” is so bad that it does serve one, and only one, purpose. The only reason “Freerunner” should be seen—and no it shouldn’t be viewed as a so-bad-its-good guilty pleasure; it’s not pleasurable even in an inebriated state, nor with food, friends and fast-flung foulness shouted back at the screen like some camp cult classics—is by aspiring filmmakers looking to learn how NOT to make a movie. “Freerunner” is a masterclass in bad movie making, because, it is a terrible, terrible film. So terrible that the word terrible doesn’t even do justice, and neither does awful, dreadful or everything else listed in that section of the thesaurus. “Freerunner” is, to use the parlance of the times in this wondrously insightful Internet age, a FAIL. And it appropriately gets an “F”.
Video
“Freerunner” is an ugly movie. And I just hate the way it looks. I suppose the 2.35:1 widescreen 1080p 24/fps AVC MPEG-4 high definition transfer from Image is an accurate representation of the film’s truly hideous cinematography, and that earns some points, mostly because it’s very obviously not a DVD (as if that actually meant something anymore). But, lets be clear, faithfulness to the source and decent levels of detail notwithstanding, this is not a beautiful Blu-ray. And looking at it is an assault on the eyes. Shot on a variety of stocks and formats—but primarily 16mm film, with some low-def DV video used during the “in game” character-cams—the style of “Freerunner” is chaotically frenetic, nauseating and, at times, just plain incompetent. Fitting for the material I guess, but, again, truly not something that’s nice to look at, even if I have to admit, the disc handles the mish-mash of materials fine. Technically, Image’s encode is pretty solid. Banding is limited to the horrible low-res cam footage, and native to the capture, not a factor of the encode at all. The cam footage is also occasionally in a different, narrower aspect ratio, but not for any rhyme or reason. I initially thought that the windowboxed footage was supposed to represent the protagonists’ point of view, and it is sometimes employed that way, but at other moments his view is presented in the full width of widescreen, so who knows why the ratio switches intermittently? Instances of aliasing and moiré are also few and far between and seemingly inherent to the source when they do appear (again, during the DV footage). And surprisingly, even with the picture clogged up by thick grain and DV-noise, detail is above average with a definite level of “HD” definition. Close ups reward with excellent clarity, and medium shots hold strong too. Where things fall apart are entirely within the stylistic realm. “Freerunner’s” over-stylized cinematography, frenzied camerawork and low-budget production values seep into every corner of every frame, robbing Image’s Blu-ray of consistency and competency. The grain structure is appropriately filmic, but wildly inconsistent. Certain segments look like they were shot with the dregs of another low-budget film’s 16mm castoffs, appearing so grainy that it actually is intrusive to the action. Light damage is present in a few frames. And contrast is so jacked up to compensate for the varying range between the limited DV and more dynamic film footage that the whites blister and bloom, blacks crush and consume shadow detail, and skintones are anything but natural throughout to wildly differing degrees of severity. Colors are also all over the place, either under or oversaturated depending on the scene. The camera shakes in every action montage, like the operator had palsy, a bad limp and no sort of camera support besides their own hands and bodyweight, and then decided to run with the freerunners, handicaps and horrible equipment and all. During most of the Parkour scenes, the film becomes meaningless from a visual standpoint, which is a shame as the stunts would have really been the only reason to see the movie, and since you can’t really see them, there’s no point at all. To top all of the stylistic incompetence off, the film’s expansive widescreen aspect ratio looks like an after thought. Not only does the screen change shape—growing narrower when it’s the protagonists POV (and remember, that only happens sometimes) as mentioned above—but certain shots and sequences left me wondering, what if it wasn’t until after the whole film was completed that the director decided he wanted the 2.35:1 shape, simply telling the guy running the Final Cut Pro or AVID suite to just center crop the image and call it a day? That’s really the only way I can explain it: like a poor-mans reverse open-matte (the crew certainly didn’t use anamorphics, and without an anamorphic lens the only way to achieve the 2.35:1 ratio would’ve been a crop of some sort, no question). There’s no method to the chaos that is the composition, with plenty of examples where objects look cut off—a billboard advertising a beach, the place the protagonist dreams of running off to, is sort of in frame in a few early rooftop scenes, but only barely, like it’s been unintentionally cropped out. Other instances abound, with some close-ups appearing too cramped, established shots looking oddly framed, and several of the gimmicky on-screen POV-cam graphics placed at the extreme edge of the blacks bars if, at least in a few scenes, actually “hidden” by the framing. If the 2.35:1 was planned from the beginning, “Freerunner” was even worse off in the hands of its cinematographer and director than I assumed. Simply put, the shots look haphazardly blocked and amateurishly lensed. “Freerunner” looks all right considering its iffy source material and generally awful direction, cinematography and production values. But it’s a head-splitting headache to really sit through, mostly because every ounce of ugliness is just magnified by the wonky variable aspect ratio, rapid fire editing rhythm and handheld camerawork. The disc is sharp and free of issues like DNR and edge enhancement. Artifacts aren’t an issue. And although intermittently soft behind the thick grain, there’s no mistaking “Freerunner” for a DVD. But there’s no way I’m actually going to give this anything more than a very low B-.
Audio
Aggressive might be a way to describe the film’s English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track (48kHz/24-bit). Annoying would work to. Loud, powerful and an unrestricted showcase of action effects, some will probably delight in the sheer booming, shaking authority of this mix. I, on the other hand, found the lossless track to be largely unrefined and too chaotic to really enjoy, much like the film. Surely, the mix matches the material. But the thumping, head-hurting bass-heavy score has all the appeal of bad rave music, and there’s little finesse in the way the soundscape is used. Yes, the splattering brain parts of exploding heads frequently populate rear speakers. An early party scene is supported by that loud, thumping music. And the horrendously written, double-awfully delivered dialog is clear—with only a few likely source-related moments of crackle—coming from the center. But there’s basically no subtly. And a really good mix is all about finding the balance between discrete atmosphere—which “Freerunner” almost complete lacks—and the outright awesomeness of explosive effects. Image has also included optional subtitles in English and Spanish.
Extras
Technically, “Freerunner” is stacked with extras. Technically, the disc includes is a pretty lengthy, impressive-on-paper, series of featurettes with, all things accounted for, a total runtime clocking in at more than 90 minutes of behind-the-scenes material. And, technically, this section probably should get a better score than an “F”. But “F” is for fail. And “Freerunner” is my new favorite synonym for failure. I wouldn’t suggest wasting your time with anything on this disc, let alone the insufferable special features (although, it’s worth mentioning that they are, quite surprisingly, encoded in 1080p where noted). First up is a thirty-minute assemblage of odds and ends from the B-roll, without narration, titles or any kind of context whatsoever. The featurette is straightforwardly called “Behind the Scenes, Outtakes and Bloopers” (1080p, 31 minutes 57 seconds). And, again I’m forced to concede that, technically bloopers, outtakes and bits of behind-the-scenes footage is exactly what’s included in this piece. Not that you’d really want to watch any of it. “Over the Rooftops and Behind the Scenes” (1080p, 30 minutes 20 seconds) is another featurette with a slightly clearer focus. This piece is a look at the stunt work and behind-the-scenes production of various scenes. It features interviews—only occasionally with the names of interviewees—and on-set footage. Skippable—if perhaps less so than the first featurette, but only because it’s ever so slightly better edited. “‘Freerunner’ Stunts, Fights and Effects” (1080p, 30 minutes 9 seconds) is another lengthy featurette, this one focusing on the laughably bad special effects and, what else, the stunts, featuring still more on-set footage, interviews and random BTS nonsense. Best part of this one? It’s gotta be the fact that nearly a third of the footage already appeared in the first two pieces. That’s quality. “Playing Ninja” (1080p, 7 minutes 32 seconds) is an overlong (no way!) featurette focusing on a game the cast and crew liked to play on-set between—and occasionally during—takes. And finally “Parkour/Freerunning” (1080p, 5 minutes 27 seconds) is a collection of stunt-based outtakes, some of which were already shown in the first featurette on this disc. For the record, the film’s theatrical trailer (2.35:1 widescreen 1080p, 1 minute 54 seconds) has also been included.
Packaging
“Freerunner” is a rare dual-layered BD-50 release from Image Home Entertainment. The disc is packaged inside an Amaray keepcase and is marked for Region A playback.
Overall
Almost anything is better than watching “Freerunner”. The Blu-ray looks decent considering the source and sounds okay for the budget, but a few fumbles on both counts make the disc pretty far from perfect. No matter, the film isn’t worth it anyway and the extras are one of the worst cases of quaintly over quality to ever grace the format. You want Parkour? Go watch that scene in “Casino Royale” or one of the “District B-13” movies, or my personal choice, that clip from “Top Gear” (2002-Present). Just, whatever you do, don’t waste your time with “Freerunner”. Skip it.
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