REVIEW: ‘Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing’ Is Enlightening and Bleak

Even those who didn’t watch Rory Kennedy‘s previous Boeing documentary will likely enter Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing with some degree of familiarity with the very public safety issues that have plagued the aeronautics manufacturer since 2018. But the actual extent of the issue is truly absurd.

The company’s cost-cutting and general disregard for safety regulations directly resulted in 2018 and 2019 plane crashes that left 346 dead. In January of 2021, one of the final initial acts of the Trump administration was to allow Boeing executives to avoid criminal prosecution if they paid a $2.5 billion settlement and cleaned up their act for a few years.

In 2022, Rory Kennedy’s documentary Downfall: The Case Against Boeing attempted to pull back the curtain on just how significant Boeing‘s corruption really was. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, as they say. But then the problems just… kept happening.

Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing looks for accountability. 

The faulty flight stabilization system that had caused the crashes continued to malfunction, albeit to less deadly results. In 2024, an Alaska Airlines flight had a door-sized hole blown in its side at 16,000 feet. John Barnett, a whistleblower who had been featured in Downfall, would take his own life two months later amidst the stress of a lengthy deposition process.

Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing, Kennedy’s new follow-up to Downfall, does not waste time with conspiracy theories that Boeing had Barnett assassinated. There’s ample evidence this is not the case. But it also doesn’t pull any punches with the role that Boeing played in Barnett’s death. Because when a corporation understands how easy it is to drive someone to the brink with a little money and effort, there’s no need to ever actually pull a trigger.

Barnett wasn’t alone to that end. There have been Boeing employees attempting to hold Boeing accountable for its malpractice for years. Freefall gathers many of these employees and lays bare all the ways in which Boeing ignored their concerns and then actively retaliated against them for daring to speak up. This includes both employees who spoke out from the beginning and those who began to speak up following the lethal crashes, painting a damning picture of the supposed cultural changes the company promised as part of their deferred prosecution agreement.

The Netflix documentary is extensive but offers little hope for change. 

Director Rory Kennedy and editors Don Kleszy and Jesse Overman find a relentless pace. The sheer volume of information that Freefall manages to squeeze into just 90 minutes is impressive. It also makes for a very draining experience, though that appears to be largely by design. There is no way to leave this film feeling optimistic about Boeing, air travel, or American capitalism as a whole.

Yeah, that Reckoning in the title? That’s a lie. The film does not document Boeing facing accountability for its negligence. It doesn’t even try to give us hope that Boeing is set to face accountability in the future. In May 2024, Boeing was found to have violated the terms of their deferred prosecution agreement. In May of 2025, the charges were dismissed anyway. The family members of plane crash victims who attempted to dispute this were told Boeing couldn’t be held accountable to the original agreement because it was voided by being violated.

The corruption on display in Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing is blatant. It is ugly. The parade of talking heads all make a compelling case for this rot being firmly embedded at the highest levels of Boeing, and Kennedy never wastes time with gloss or shine when a simple glimpse of wickedness will do. If the film does one thing, it makes the compelling case that the only hope for Boeing’s recovery is a complete overhaul of the entire corporation.

The corruption needs to be exposed, but plenty of viewers will already know the ins and outs of this case.

The level of futility that permeates Freefall does raise the question of why? Obviously this level of corruption deserves to be exposed, but the information presented here is largely a retread of information we already heard in Downfall. It’s all at a bigger scale, sure. But many viewers will have seen that coming. For a documentarian of Kennedy’s caliber, it’s an odd choice to spend an entire film revisiting a topic when we’re also seeing equal levels of corruption in areas like agriculture, technology, and healthcare.

There’s no way to answer why Kennedy made that choice. Some recent interviews suggest she believes the film’s publicity could have consequences that didn’t appear the first time around. I won’t hold my breath. But those who watched the first film and want an even clearer picture of Boeing’s corporate decay won’t need to look much further than this.

Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing is streaming now on Netflix.