Solidrariol Am I Missing Something?

Kailansorac Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

Catangro After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Scarlet The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Michael Ledo Three boys from the hood were taken out of jail and enrolled in the police academy by a cougar named Lydia (Desperate Housewife Dana Delany). Malo's (50 Cents) father was once in the police force. The three graduates are assigned to crooked cop Joseph Sarcone (Robert De Niro) who deals drugs and skims on the takes. They become part of the bad cop crime scene.The plot develops as we discover both Lydia's husband and Malo's father were murdered. Malo has two love interests in this film, neither of which was acting. Anabelle Acosta plays his childhood sweetheart...when he was a thug and Beau Garrett is a bar tender at a special bad boy cop bar who like Malo likes peanut butter.For those who like crooked cop dramas, this one pasts the smell test, largely due to the strength of the supporting cast. 50 Cents' performance was far from credible and weighed down the film. He needs to learn his productions would do better if he wasn't in them.PARENTAL GUIDE: F-bomb, sex, party girls nudity, n-word.

Claudio Carvalho In New York, three smalltime hoodlums are arrested and years later they become NYPD officers. When they are celebrating in a bar, Captain Joe Sarcone (Robert De Niro) summons Jonas "Malo" Maldonado (50 Cent) to sit at his table. Sarcose was the partner of Malo's deceased father and he invites Malo to join his team of corrupt cops. The rookie Malo teams up with the dirty Dennis LaRue (Forest Whitaker) and he begins his career of crime in the police department. But when his former trainer Lydia Vecchio (Dana Delany), whose husband worked at the Internal Affairs when he was murdered, shows evidences of his father's death to him, Malo returns to the side of the law to seek revenge against those that killed his father."Freelancers" is a movie with a messy story about corrupt NYPD officers. The lead character is a hoodlum that becomes a dirty cop, but comes back to the side of the law to revenge the death of his father and ends invited to join the Internal Affairs. Lydia has conclusive evidences against Sarcose and his gang, but they are not enough to arrest the dirty cop that is not under surveillance. The great cast is lost in a poor screenplay and a weak direction. My vote is four.Title (Brazil): "Assassinos de Aluguel" ("Hired Killers")

Rich Wright Take out all the scenes of coke-snorting, erotic dancing, fast-motion long shots of New York and endless swearing and you'll probably be left with just half an hour. Which would STILL be too long. It's a shapeless mess with lots of well known actors who should know better, being all 'hard' and 'street'. This is just a front, though... the reality is that this is more pantomime than grit. Every time someone whips out a gun, cusses or lets fly with their fists it all feels fake and rehearsed, as if this was a Hollywood executive's idea of a ghetto.. when he'd been living in a mansion at Beverly Hills for all his life.It's staggering to contemplate that this production contains not one, but TWO Oscar winners. Forest Whitaker I can understand... he's second only to Cuba Gooding Jr in the slumming Academy Award winners stake. But Robert De Niro... what a shocker. This is, without a doubt, this worst film I've seen him in. The sad fact is, he lends gravitas to his role in a film with no use for it. And there's barely anything more depressing than a writer trying to script what he thinks is a complex ending, which is about 100 times less intelligent than he thinks it is.Lastly, this movie is known as Crossfire here in the good ol' UK. Perhaps they should have changed it further, and retitled it Misfire. Tee hee, I made a funny... 4/10

TdSmth5 One Curtis Jackson and his giant teeth play Malo, a rookie cop who just graduated from police academy. Also graduating are his two childhood friends, one black the other white. The black one is assigned another black cop to be his training officer, a good guy trying to help his community. The white guy is assigned a white racist cop as his TO. The reason to mention this is because initially the movie makes a big fuzz about race.Malo is immediately invited by a veteran corrupt cop played by De Niro to his corrupt squad that dedicates itself to stealing money and drug and reselling them. It's Malo's birthright to join the squad because his dad was also cop and part of this corrupt unit that has connection up to the mayor's office. Malo joins and is assigned Forest Whitaker as his TO, who plays a drug addicted version of The Shield's Vic Mackey.At first Malo goes along with things and even tries to get his two friends to be invited to join. But eventually he learns a lot more about the unit and his dad. His dad as it turns out was informing on De Niro and the group and that cost him his life. He was basically executed by De Niro in front of little Malo. So now Malo has another reason to be in the squad and learn all the dirty secrets including info on De Niro's boss, some guy named Baez.All this sounds exciting and it actually is, for the first hour. Then Malo devises and executes his plan to avenge his father's death. Unfortunately the last 30 minutes are somewhat of a mess, when that should be even more interesting than the beginning. The whole issue of race and some of the other characters are dropped completely. Too much focus is placed on Malo's love life and womanizing ways. There's more to the female characters as well. But as with Malo's friends important scenes that would make things more interesting ended up in the deleted scenes section. The story is good and you want to know what happens, but the direction and editing are weak. They butchered the story unnecessarily. Performances are good by De Niro, Whitaker, Gerald. Anabelle Acosta and Beau Garrett are lovely but we learn more about the characters in deleted scenes than in the movie. The lead character though is unconvincing and the performance by this "actor" poor, he also produced the movie so it looks like it's a vanity project more than anything else. A movie like this needs a more charismatic lead. Freelancers could have been a decent movie about corrupt cops but direction, editing, and acting ruined it.