Mick in the Movies

Mick Jagger is back after a long absence from the film world. The man who remains at the very heart of rock legend has never become any more than a trivial celluloid figure, shooting with increasing rapidity toward the margins and fringes of the film universe's great trash heap. The pile is already overflowing. Masterpieces featuring Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder (together) lie there and fester. And they're joined by the works of Christopher Reeve, Sophia Copola, whoever played Enzo the Baker (favorite line: "Hello, I'm Enzo the Baker, don't you remember me?), Mark Hamill, and the midget in the R2D2 droid uniform.

But Mick refuses to die; he has resurfaced in Freejack, the sci-fi thriller about the manipulation of dead bodies in a futuristic nuclear wasteland. If he's hoping to achieve some type of motion picture coup, he might be well advised to try again, judging by the movie's reviews.

But it seems unlikely that the power and artfulness of the Freejack script would have been enough to draw a success-seeking Jagger back into the world of movies. And we all know you can't always get what you want. So why has Mick come back after around 20 years away from the silver screen?

The answer may lie in the wastebarrels of film history. It seems that Freejack and movies of its ilk are exactly what make Mick tick.

Jagger starred in two 1970 movies, Performance and Ned Kelly. The former told of the relationship between a London gangster/extortionist (James Fox) and his landlord (Jagger). Ned Kelly was apparently more of a star vehicle for Jagger, who commanded the role of the title character, a courageous, steelhearted Irish rebel farmer.

Interestingly, the one characteristic linking these two Jagger films is a bizarre kind of violence. New York Times film critic Roger Greenspun noted this similarity when he described an "initial voluptuous sadism" in Performance.

But what about Jagger as an actor? Greenspun wrote:

"Mick Jagger, with luxurious black hair and full red lips that suggest an androgynous preRaphaelite beauty, has less to do [than Fox], but he projects a presence of considerable mystery." A.H. Weiler, on the other hand, was less glowing about Jagger's perfomance in Ned Kelly:

"As the ill-fated titular hero, Mick Jagger, the rock singer, with a beard that makes him appear more Amish than Australian, is, sadly, simply a dour renegade who rarely becomes the 'wild colonial boy' of the legend."

And now there's Freejack.

So maybe he was seduced by the film's bizarre violence, by the presence of Anthony "Hannibal the Cannibal" Hopkins, or by its grim worldview. In any case, Jagger's acting apparently hasn't improved, and he's not bound to win an Oscar. Maybe, just as in 1970, he's still doomed to be a (Jumpin' Jack) flash in the pan.