Sound of Freedom: Review

Ultimately the stories surrounding this movie will probably be more interesting than the movie itself

One of the features on my Marcus Theatres app is that some movies get awarded the “Marcus Spotlight” banner. Typically, these are films that are gaining high attention for different critical, artistic, or cultural reasons. They’re never big-budget blockbusters and are almost always movies created (or at least feel created) outside of corporate superpowers (doubt a Disney movie will ever get such a banner).

Last week, I noticed Sound of Freedom had the Marcus Spotlight banner. Despite thinking this was the first time I came across the title (I had no memory of watching a preview), something about it sounded eerily familiar. It wasn’t until I was purchasing my ticket, that the familiar feeling finally hit me! Probably a week or so prior, I came across a Twitter post about a recent film with Q-anon conspiracy connections garnering commercial attention. At the time, I ignored and scrolled past the post, thinking it was some small fringe film on the Internet somewhere that some news profile was making a bigger story out of it for some clicks. But here it was titled Sound of Freedom with the coveted Marcus Spotlight banner.

Now before I get into my review, I am here to give my opinion on films and how well films are crafted. I have no idea about the integrity or accuracy of these conspiracy allegations. I am here simply to watch a film and give my honest opinions on how it was made and the artistry behind it. Film is ultimately art and not a forum for activism in my eyes (feel free to disagree with me on that), and unless a film is taking a focused approach to political propaganda, I could care less about the politics of its creators.

For those who don’t know, Sound of Freedom is a non-violent, horror movie about child trafficking. It’s inspired by a true story about Tim Ballard and his work with project O.U.R or Operation Underground Railroad which conducted a series of stings to bring down child trafficking rings. I’ll let you do the research to see how accurate the film portrayal is because the reports are a little mixed. Nevertheless, no film is actually accurate in its entirety whether it be Sound of Freedom or Lincoln (2012). Its accuracy is not the most important part, but the production that I care about, which leaves a lot to be desired.

The only word I can use to describe how the film’s production feels is rushed. Ironic because the film admitted that it took five years to be completed highlighted in its “Special Message” after the credits. And even if that admission was removed, the editing and pacing scream to me that there were significant issues and likely reshoots required to finish the project. There are scenes where I expect the film to hold a little longer in the emotional gravity of a moment only to fade quietly to a new establishing shot almost immediately. I got the impression director Alejandro Monteverde was checking boxes of his script and moving right along before I got the time to settle with a scene. These are moments when the film needed to take a second and let the scenes and characters breathe.

While I’m on the script, I might as well get my biggest gripe out of the way: the characters in this movie are just…so….bleh. Everything about them feels one-dimensional and surface-level. The first act misses some major opportunities to establish our lead character played decently well by Jim Caviezel. Unfortunately, Caviezel is not given a lot to work with as his character’s main pitch to get you behind him is that he catches pedophiles. Well, that’s kind of like asking me to be scared of someone because they’re holding a gun to my head. Of course, I’m going to, and of course, I’m going to root for our lead character. What disappointed me is that we never dive deeper past that into who Ballard is as a man and the specific motives whether those be his glorious dreams or his darkest fears that truly drive him. All I get are emotional reactions and a personal drive that I would expect of any decent human being in his position. Nothing about him screams unique or interesting in his traits.

The side characters also don’t offer much else besides being other pedo catchers, and Ballard’s wife in the film basically didn’t even need to be present. The villains, though, are truly some of the weakest bad guys I’ve ever watched in a movie. There’s nothing about these traffickers that isn’t the most baseline image that you would conjure of them in your head. And maybe, you’d argue that characters depicting the bottom barrel of humanity don’t deserve to get nuanced looks or have more fleshed-out motives written for them. I would agree with you, which is likely why movies about this subject are typically not made. It goes against the old saying that a movie is only as good as its villain, and since topics concerning child traffickers end up being good arguments for capital punishment, it’s hard to create an interesting look into the subject at hand. Good villains typically garner a varying level of sympathy (think Zuko in the Nickelodeon show Avatar) or an understood but twisted motive (like Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War), but since none rightfully exists for pedophiles and child traffickers, our villains are basic and substanceless. Additionally, you could make a villain stand out by portraying them in a uniquely terrifying way. But nothing about our villains is particularly scary except for the very clear and obvious: they traffic children. Nothing unique about the horrors of these monsters is present other than what I would have already assumed about them after hearing what they do. All Monteverde has done is have me pay to watch them on a big screen.

Another big problem: the dialogue. It’s bad. Like really awful. Bland, uninteresting, and sometimes just corny. It never reveals any secret motives about our characters or sheds new light on the plot. It’s just all kind of there to keep the narrative flowing. Speaking of flow, the pacing of this movie is pretty much what you would expect of a movie that was stuck in five years of production limbo. Plot points sort of just get thrown out there (a CEO arrested for having a sex island, we should do that to catch bad guys!) with not a lot of thought or reasoning supporting them and are hurriedly planned out. The obstacles our characters encounter are brief and easily overcome in a matter of moments. I never feel like our characters are in real danger until the third act, which is significantly better than the first two. And while it does get tense by the end, it’s ultimately left with cleaning up a narrative mess that the first two-thirds left it.

Now not all of this movie is sour. Like I said earlier, Caviezel is good and the rest of the crew do their parts. The score has some real high points. There’s a particularly beautiful song played at the end of the movie where a woman’s voice (I’m assuming singing in Spanish) echoes in the forefront, kind of like in the chambers of a church. The second act has some odd music supervision, but the beautiful songs layered with strings and choir performances do more than enough to make up for it. The cinematography is also pretty nice. The shots are sharp and there’s an orange tint I enjoyed over the scenes in Central and South America. But all of this does little to provide artistic value from a script that seriously needed some rewriting.

At the end of it, I’m sort of stumped on the underlying goal or subtext of the film. There’s a “Special Message” after the credits that I alluded to where Caviezel addresses the audience in a way I’ve not seen ever done in a movie before. He explains the backstory and intentions of the filmmakers claiming that the true heroes of this story are not his character or other law enforcement parties, but the children and victims themselves. Yet, our two lead child actors are robbed of the serious screentime requiring that, which was very disappointing because, besides their young age, they had some harrowing moments that impressed me. I think what his claim does do, though, is explain to me why I left this movie empty. The filmmakers are clearly trying to create a film that shines the spotlight on the atrocity and its victims at hand and away from the common heroes, which I think is an admirable idea, but narratively, the film is clearly focused on Caviezel and his law enforcement team. In the end, the direction and writing end up clashing with each other so much that there really is no focus and you’re left with empty, one-dimensional characters in a film that can’t seem to figure out how to portray its message.

There’s going to be controversy surrounding this film and whether or not that’s justified is up to you. Caviezel brought up the five years the movie spent in production and sort of insinuated a corruptive force that was responsible for it. I have no idea if that’s the case, but I do know there are a million reasons why a project could get stuck in production, and Sound of Freedom looks reshot and reproduced af. He claims the names going up the credits are brave people who took a stand to make the film, but I’m skeptical of how brave it really is to take a moral side on an issue that any human being with just the most baseline level of morality and decency would emphatically take as well.

I certainly hope child trafficking is combated in the real world, and I agree with the filmmakers that it is absolutely the most horrific issue occurring in the world today. But I don’t think that Sound of Freedom’s story is told in a way that I haven’t seen done significantly better in hundreds of other films. The writing is surface-level, the characters are empty, the direction lacks focus, and the production is rushed. So while I hope people and policymakers confront the atrocities committed in not only the distant world but also in our backyard, I don’t think it will be because they saw Monteverde’s Sound of Freedom. But if they do, it would be by far the most impressive thing about the film.

Final Thought?

4.4