The Dark Herald Recommends: Sound of Freedom
Sound of Freedom is a great film that tackles an absolutely brutal subject. And let’s be clear I don’t mean it’s a great film by the standards of “Christian films,” It’s a great film period. Certainly, the best I’ve seen this year.
Sound of Freedom starts with a Hispanic father taking his kids a boy and a girl to an audition. It looks legitimate enough. He’s instructed to leave and come back in a few hours, when he comes back, the apartment is empty and with growing horror, he realizes his kids have been taken.
Any parent who has lost sight of their kid in a crowd for more than five seconds knows how it feels to have that bucket of ice water dumped over their heads. I can only imagine what it’s like to have that go on for days and the sad look in the cop’s eyes when he says, “We’ll do everything we can,” and you both know he’s lying because there is nothing they can do.
Jim Caviezel stars as Tim Ballard, a Homeland Security agent who is tasked with taking down pedophile networks. Caviezel turns in his best performance here in the underselling of a man who is clearly haunted by his job, he has to gaze into the abyss every day. The children whose lives are being murdered before his eyes are too far from him to reach. The only thing he can do is take down the end users. He’s catching minnows and this broken world is producing more minnows every day.
His latest collar, however, presents him with a window of opportunity. He releases the creep, pretending to be a secret pedophile himself. He knows all the secret code language they use it isn’t that hard. He gets the information he needs to rescue the boy from the opening scene, the boy begs him to find his sister.
Ballard sets out to do so but she’s already out of the country.
There will be absolutely no spoilers from here on out.
I can’t praise Caviezel’s work enough here. He absolutely kills this role. He brings the quiet torment that Ballard feels and that the only things sustaining him are his family and his faith in Christ.
This is a dark and horrifying subject and this film treads the very fine line between shying from it and exploitatively diving into it. You are left knowing what happened without having to see it.
Bill Camp’s Vampiro provides the needed comic relief as a former Cartel man who is finding his own path to redemption as a man who buys child slaves and frees them.
For some reason, this is being marketed as an action movie and it absolutely isn’t. None of those tropes are present. This is a haunting character-driven story. These events are going on constantly day to day. Children get snatched off the streets and have their lives and their families are shattered, we only get to sleep at night because we don’t think about the lives of children who can’t sleep at night because of what happened to them that day.
Well, you can afford to think about it for a couple of hours and you can probably afford the price of a ticket. If you can’t, Sound of Freedom is going to be released on Twitter in mid-July.
The Dark Herald Recommends with Enthusiasm. (5/5)
Footnotes:
Here are a few notes that didn’t belong in the actual review.
This is a film where the pop culture fallout has been intense.
When the pressure gets raised you start to find out who is really who. The Guardian (guardian of what? I now wonder), attacked the film as QAnon adjacent. Rolling Stone said, “Sound Of Freedom’ Is a Superhero Movie for Dads With Brainworms,” which set the tone for the whole article. Both of these internet rags had praised the horrifying Cuties as a sensitive coming-of-age story.
What shocked the hell out of me was that Variety (freaking Variety), called it “a compelling movie that shines an authentic light on one of the crucial criminal horrors of our time, one that Hollywood has mostly shied away from.” You have no idea how stunned I was to find someone at Variety had a soul. Its coverage has been entirely supportive to include praise for Jim Caviezel.
Disney is getting accused of either deliberately burying a film on child trafficking or being stupid for not releasing it and actually turning a profit on something this year. The truth is neither of those things is going on and if you are about to accuse ME of being Disney shill go be stupid somewhere else Patrick.
Disney accidentally acquired this film in the Fox Entertainment buyout, they did shelve it but there were probably some thumbnail plans to put it on Hulu. The reason I say that is that they didn’t take a tax write-down in it. If Disney had done that it would have been permanently sent to the Iron Vault of Tax Write-Offs and it never could have been released under any circumstances. When Angel Studios made an offer, Disney was happy to accept the money and I’m not entirely certain Disney isn’t getting anything from this film because it starts with the Fox Entertainment logo. They wouldn’t have left that logo in unless contractually obligated to do so.
And the big thing here is that Disney wouldn’t have made any money if it had released it. This is a film that could only have the success it’s had by being released through the Christian word-of-mouth network. It is a gift that we would never have accepted from Bob Iger’s hand.
Okay, I’m done here.
