“Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing” is angry, and it wants you angry too. Rory Kennedy’s documentary picks up where the corporate rot of Boeing’s last decade left off, using the death of former employee John Barnett as its center. Barnett appears in archive footage, a figure who hangs over the whole film.
Trailer, via Netflix.
Barnett’s Shadow
Barnett’s death sits over every frame. Kennedy doesn’t turn it into a spectacle, but she doesn’t let you forget it either. The film treats him as the door into a much larger machine, one built on cut corners and buried warnings.
The Insiders Speak
Sam Salehpour, a Boeing quality engineer, and Sam Mohawk, a Boeing quality investigator, carry the film’s back half. Roy Irvin and Merle Meyers, both former Boeing quality staff, add weight from the inside. Rob Turkewitz, Barnett’s attorney, speaks to the personal loss at the story’s core. These are not actors performing outrage. They are people who believed in a company that failed them, and they say so plainly, on camera, without hesitation.
That simplicity is the film’s strongest quality. Kennedy and writers Mark Bailey and Keven McAlester don’t dress up the accounts with unnecessary style. They let the testimony sit, plain and direct, and trust the audience to sit with it too.
contains more than enough righteous fury to justify your attention
That’s the film in one line, per RogerEbert.com. It is furious, and it earns that fury.
Old Ground
Where the film stumbles is in familiarity. Much of this ground was already covered in 2022’s “Downfall,” and “Freefall” doesn’t chart new territory so much as it goes over the same ground with fresh witnesses. If you’ve seen that earlier film, little here will surprise you, even as the specific accounts hit hard.
There’s also no comfort offered at the end. No fix, no one made to answer for it, no sense that anything changes because this film exists.
No Comfort Offered
You will not leave reassured about air travel.
You won’t leave reassured about American business either. That’s not a flaw. It’s the point. Kennedy isn’t interested in a settled end, because Boeing hasn’t given anyone one. The film ends where the crisis still stands: not settled, still going, and carried by people who risked everything to say so out loud.
“Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing” is a necessary, if not new, continuation of a story that refuses to end. It’s built on testimony, not spectacle, and that testimony is sharp enough to carry it. Kennedy lets those voices land here again.
