Now you don't need me to tell you that it's been pretty uninspiring year at the box office. Yeah, there's been success stories like Super Mario Brothers, Across the Spider-Verse and Guardians of the Galaxy 3, but generally 2023 has been a Relentless Cavalcade of disappointingly bland superhero films, unwanted remakes and massive failures like Dial of Destiny, Shazam 2, The Flash and The Little Mermaid.
It seems like almost nothing is inspiring people to go to the movies these days, but then along comes a little low budget movie like "Sound of Freedom" that I can honestly say I knew precisely nothing about until a few weeks ago which seems to have ignited some kind of firestorm in the public Consciouness and capitalized on the gape and hole left by dial of Destiny's implosion resulting in massive performance at the box office.
Despite initial skepticism I decided to give the film a chance and gues what, Sound of Freedom is really awesome! In fact I'd go so far as to say that it deserves the hype and praise that it's been that it's been getting managing to tackle some pretty brutal subject matter in a sensitive and restrained way that never feels exploitative delivering some excellent performances from a talented cast that don't overshadow their roles and a storyline that feels neatly grounded in the true events that it's been based on.
In short it's exactly what you'd want in a movie like this keeping you gripped and tense right until the end and almost never descended into the kind of extravagant Hollywood tropes that often derail true stories like this, so let's dive right in and summarize the plots.
The story centers around Tim Ballard, a Homeland Security agent tasked with monitoring and arresting child traffickers across the United States. Needles to say it's a tough job that take its toll on the man's emotions, but the bigger problem is that for all the criminals they've put in prison they failed to recover any of their actual victims. Most of the time it's because they're outside Ballard's jurisdiction hidden away in places like Mexico and Central America.
Someday Ballad finally manages to recover a trafficking victim named Miguel who begs him to rescue his sister he hatches a plan to mount a massive sting operation that take down the entire network and save dozens possibly even hundreds of innocent children. The plan eventually sees them traveling to Colombia and partnering up with a former cartel boss who's turned his life around. As the men work to set up a false front and gain the trust of the child traffickers, but with his superiors threatening to pull the plug and his Partners growing suspicious of his intentiuons can Ballard really hope to pull of the seemingly impossible.
How much will he be willing to risk to complete his mission, and can he really hope to reunite Miguel with his lost sister?
One of the things that really impressed me about Sound of Freedom was how restrained grounded it always. It's been classified as an action movie for some reason, but if you're expecting to see gunfights, explosons and big blowouts set pieces you're definitely going to be disappointed because that's absolutely not what this film is, it's more of a tense character-driven drama, very much grounded in reality where there's no big dramatic resolutions to the major plot points, no climactic batthe that sees our hero fighting his way of an impossible situation.
What get instead all of these typical stuff from action movies is the grinding reality of work like this the negotiations and information gathering that goes on behind the scenes, the tough decisions and compromises that have to be made for the greater good, the personal risks and sacrifices that the job demands. You can see toll is taken on Ballard the things he's forced to see that will probably haunt him for the rest of his life, the people he's forced to play nice with when you can tell he'd much rather be her faces into f***ing Mars!
It's all hammered home by some pretty harrowing scenes of the trafficking victims themselves and what they're subjected to, I mean let's face it seeing young kids being subjected to stuff like this is always going to be a tough watch, but the film's credit it never gets gratuitous or exploitative. For pure shock value it shows you just enough to leave you in no doubt about what's going to happen or what just took place without feeling the need to show the disgusting act itself.
The plot walks a fine line, but it does it with sensitivity and good judgement thank God and big props to the actors for their work on this one. Jim Caviezel's had a bit of a weird career in his Time, starring in big movies like Passion of the Christ and The Count of Monte Cristo, but it's like he was never quite able to Partly those roles into mainstream success. Caviziel feels like he's been a star and waiting for 20 years now, but I've got to say he gives a knockout performance and Sound of Freedom!
In the film he's restrained in some dude as Tim Ballard, but he can see a lot with just the slight change of expression or a haunted look in his eyes. Ballard is a man that's seen things you'll be able to unsee and it weighs heavily on his soul he's neatly balanced out to Bill Camp as a former cartel employee trying to return for past mistakes, so Camp provides a bit of much needed levity in what's obviously a pretty heavy movie Always chomping on cigars and cracking jokes but Underneath It All there's some pretty dark secrets that only come out near the finale.
What's almost as interesting as the movie itself is the reaction it seems to have provoked from the mainstream media that seemed determined to tear a donot at any cost. I mean you'd think a movie that sheds light on the hidden nightmare of child trafficking would be a pretty admirable cause worthy of support , but apparently not for the people who applauded cuties as a bold piece of artistic expression. Why don't they want this movie succeed, why is Hollywood so defensive of it? It almost gets you thinking, doesn't it?🤔🙄
Either way regardless of the media Firestorm region around it, Sound of Freedom is an excellent movie that kept me thoroughly gripped from start to finish. It's a film that reminds us that even though there's a lot of bad people in this world doing the worst things imaginable, there are also still good men fighting to bring them to justice.
Maybe that's something we could all do with remembering.
