Freelance: You’d get more sparks from rubbing a wet flannel with a wetter rock than from John Cena and Alison Brie

To say it is doing the latest John Cena demolition derby a favour to mention it in the same sentence as It Happened One Night would be to understate the case. It is akin to putting The Hay Wain in the same sentence as a bucket of pigswill. But I’ve done it now, so I may as well note that Freelance, an action comedy banished to Prime Video, is in a genre that dates back to that Frank Capra classic.

You know the sort of thing. A rough-hewn adventurer (say Clark Gable or John Cena) accompanies a snooty woman (say Claudette Colbert or Alison Brie) across unforgiving territory. There is the odd frisson when they are forced to share overnight accommodation. There is much bickering elsewhere. The Jewel of the Nile films worked the pattern in with the action movie. Now the world has this.

As we are in the genealogy game, let us note that Freelance also owes a fair bit to the Arnold Schwarzenegger high-concept comedy. We begin with Cena telling us how, after an early life in the special forces, he retrained as a lawyer and now lives uneasily in generic suburbia. He loves his pretty daughter. He sort of loves his beautiful wife. But something is not quite right.

Fret not. Old pal Christian Slater is here with an offer of security work protecting a high-profile journalist while she interviews a Latin American dictator. It’s Alison Brie from Community, Mad Men and other good things that will not have prepared her for this degree of violent slumming.

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So, blah, blah, blah ... Things go wrong and we end up fleeing from rebels in the jungles of Caldonia. (That fictional name is, by the way, far, far too close to the Latin for Scotland.) No rocket launcher remains unfired. No helicopter remains uncrashed.

There is a degree of competence to the action. Playing to Call of Duty beats, the explosions and eviscerations will at least keep you awake. The patronising depictions of South or Central America would be industry standard for 1998. What really disappoints is the utter lack of fizzle between Cena (a likable action hero) and Brie (a genuinely gifted comic actor). You would get more sparks from rubbing a wet flannel with a wetter rock. But try it anyway. It could hardly be more tedious than waiting for Freelance to crawl to its predictable denouement.

Freelance streams on Prime Video from New Year’s Day