FluxBlog

I was convinced to go see The Sound of Freedom, a movie I didn’t know existed until it hit theaters, but I saw it nonetheless and while I have a different channel for entertainment reviews this movie has spurred a lot of political debates and thus this channel just feels more appropriate, so let’s get into it.

First of all, this movie was long. It was 2 hours and 15 minutes and it FELT like it was 2 hours and 15 minutes. Part of the length was your typical staring off into the middle distant nonsense, but a lot, A LOT of the movie consisted of scenes that just ran too long.

Just about every scene needed to be trimmed down. Some seconds, some minutes, but nevertheless something. This movie felt very long.

The Sound of Freedom is, according to the people behind it, based on a true story except for the parts that aren’t.

It’s essentially based upon a man named Timothy Ballard who worked, allegedly, for the Department of Homeland Security in the area of human trafficking - specifically related to child sex trafficking.

In the film after catching such a trafficker who was sharing photos online, Tim’s partner says he can’t get the faces of the victims out of his head and he can’t do the job anymore. The partner then asks how many pedos have been caught and the number is over 200 but then he asks if Tim has ever actually saved a child which feels like a big moment and eye-opener in Tim’s eyes.

This leads Tim to ask his boss for a week to try and set up a sting to save a child by befriending the pedo he caught a few scenes prior and pretending to be one himself in order to arrange a weekend with a child. This operation goes to plan and a little boy is saved at the US Border with Mexico but, plot twist, this boy was kidnapped simultaneously with his sister and the father of these children expresses his sadness of knowing his daughter, Rocio, is still out there somewhere. Miguel, the boy who was rescued gifts Tim a necklace of Saint Timothy and asks Tim to save his sister before heading home with his dad.

This convinces Tim to talk his boss into setting up another operation where he threatens the second trafficker who was caught at the border to figure out the next link in the chain. Tim’s boss agrees to let him temporarily go to Columbia with a laughable stipend of $10k.

While in Cartagena, Tim starts working with a local cop as well as a former Cartel accountant who has turned over a new leaf and is in the business of buying children and setting them free.

They start to work together with a DHS contact / billionaire who fancies himself a wannabe cop and they hatch a plan to set up a sort of mock Epstein island in order to lure traffickers and simultaneously free as many kids as possible. All in an effort to find Rocio.

After things go wildly off budget with no results, Tim is ordered to come home and scrap the mission.

Our hero then calls his wife and after discussing things with her she agrees he should quit his job and find this missing little girl with the help of the locals in Cartagena along with our billionaire who gets talked into continuing to finance things.

The idea that Tim wouldn’t take a leave of absence here confused me and it seemed rash to quit his job considering he had like 5 or so kids at home. The movie also makes the point that he’s walking away from a nearly vested pension with is typically unheard of in the real world.

This movie is scant on character building. The only personal backstory we get for Tim is that he’s married, he had a grip of kids, his wife supported his new mission and that’s about it.

We have to suppose that Tim is independently wealthy or some such because “honey I’m quitting my job to go search for a missing girl with no clues on another continent” just seems bizarre.

Bizarre or not, that’s where our story takes us.

So the quasi-Epstein island plan continues and it works out and 50 or so kids are rescued in the least action packed scene I could imagine under such circumstances and… Rocio isn’t amongst the victims.

This is where the movie should have ended. It would have been a downer but it also would have tracked with reality and the mission of this movie which I’ll get to in a minute.

Instead, however, our movie continues with Tim’s cop friend interrogating one of the traffickers and finding out that Rocio has been sold to a rebel leader deep in the Columbian jungle. So working with his two compatriots, the billionaire has left the movie by now, they travel into the jungle posing as United Nations health workers delivering vaccines which I’m pretty sure is a violation of the Geneva Convention.

While mucking about in the Amazon, Tim miraculously finds Rocio and has to kill the rebel leader to rescue her, they escape the compound, make it up river and through what appears to be the only armed outpost between the rebels and civilization - which is just absurd - and then she’s reunited with her father and brother and the movie ends with Rocio playing with a drum her father bought for her while she was missing.

It wasn’t a bad movie but a few things were broken. The first is the title. When the kids are rescued on the island they’re seen all singing and drumming a particular beat and one of the characters calls it “the sound of freedom”. That’s fine but it’s such a missed opportunity because it’s implied, but never explicitly made clear, that this drum beat was learned from Rocio who is seen drumming it at the start and end of the film, as well as throughout.

It’s a little too on the nose while simultaneously being left up to assumption at the same time.

The next real problem is that the 4th Act was nonsense. The entire jungle adventure stretched credulity and just served to make Tim the badass hero that saved the day when that very mission is loosely based upon a mission in the Dominican Republic / Haiti where a little boy they were after was not, in fact, found.

And that’s where this movie really lost me. This movie was part biopic, with little in the way of bio because the real life Timothy Ballard is sort of an enigma, and the rest of the movie is part rescue story where some rescuing happened with the most impactful rescue in the film being nearly made up out of whole cloth.

It’s a fabrication. It is loosely based upon something that happened in Haiti / the Dominican Republic and tacked onto this movie that itself is loosely based upon events that occurred in and around Cartagena, Columbia. It was completely unnecessary.

It put this movie into the wrong sort of propaganda. For example, when the Liam Neeson movie “Taken” came out many years ago, one of my big complaints about that movie was that his daughter gets kidnapped with a friend of hers and he uses his “very particular set of skills” as he goes and rescues his daughter and that’s basically it.

All of the other girls who were being trafficked are still being trafficked. All of the people who’s lives were ruined, still have ruined lives. He just goes and rescues his daughter, more or less.

The system doesn’t get dismantled or even really set back because the point was for a father to rescue his daughter, end of story.

We’ve seen this trope in countless movies with Rambo: Last Blood, despite the victim not being his daughter, coming to mind somewhat recently.

The Sound of Freedom went down this same path where Ballard is out to rescue a little girl and part of his justification is how he would feel if it were his child.

So he rescues this girl but then the movie has a call to action in the mid-credits where the main actor Jim Caviezel, asks people to buy tickets for others to see the movie - to pay it forward - because something something the more people who see this movie the more people will care about human trafficking I guess.

However, that 4th Act makes the call to action feel dishonest because the movie made it out like one guy can travel into the deepest recesses of the Columbian jungle in order to save the person he’s looking to save. The problem is presented as way more solvable than the call to action outlines.

By manipulating the facts and story, the filmmakers were playing with emotions in this movie and too many chomped on hook, line, and sinker. I’ve seen several reviews and recommendations where the movie is talked about as some “based on real events” drama without acknowledging how little was based in reality.

In the real life events, in the real life island sting, not all of the victims were children and so this idea that they had to make them all children to make it more dramatic, and they had to add a fourth act to make it more dramatic, and Ballard had to save the little girl to make it more dramatic - then the filmmakers want to turn around and act like this is based on a true story and real events with all of these heroic things just serves to make the film feel like propaganda and that puts me off.

Because this movie is based upon a real guy I did a quick search on him and the organizations he’s involved with and the facts don’t lend themselves to this movie except in the broadest sense.

I’m not sure if it’s because of union rules or a settlement agreement or what, but the Department of Justice won’t release any information about Ballard without his permission and the actual Timothy Ballard has refused to let the DOJ release his records. The filmmakers base this movie upon his involvement at the Department of Homeland Security and all of that comes down to a “trust me” scenario.

The background information feels suspect and doesn’t help the narrative.

Taking that into effect, if we go back to the island raid, the muddying of the ages of the victims starts to feel dishonest.

By removing nuance from what really happened while playing up the most horrible ways to traffic children, even opening the movie on scenes of children being literally snatched off of the streets in third world nations, doesn’t make me want to take the filmmakers seriously with their call to action - especially when that call to action is to boost their box office revenues under the pretense of the importance of telling a story that has been massaged and manipulated from top to bottom.

On the FAQ / Fact Check on O.U.R.’s website, the organization the real Ballard is involved with, they even admit that most children are groomed as opposed to the type of trafficking showcased here for dramatic effect.

So yeah, this movie does what all “based on real life events” movies do, it plays really fast and loose with the truth and then wants to prey on the emotions that were elicited by that loose representation of reality.

It’s why I try to avoid biopics and “based on true events” movies because the most interesting things in those movies tend to be the things that are the least verifiable or, usually worse, the things that are verifiably untrue and simply added for dramatic effect.

The MOST dramatic part of this film was the jungle rescue which had nothing to do with the actual story that is referenced in this film. Yes, the island raid was somewhat dramatic despite there being almost zero action involved in the raid itself. The premise of that raid, the mostly true part of the movie, was vastly overshadowed by nonsense.

If you watch this movie and see the real life footage of the island raid with the real Timothy Ballard - which they show you in the credits - you would have no reason, in the theater, to think that the little girl he rescued in the jungle wasn’t, in fact, rescued.

Furthermore, the movie somewhat conflates adult sex work with child sex trafficking and this is a point that the movie played with but didn’t really address in any meaningful way.

As I mentioned earlier, during the real life island sting there were adult prostitutes as opposed to it just being kids as seen in the film.

While explaining that and staying truer to reality could be seen as too complex or complicating the story, the filmmakers played into this premise when the ex-Cartel guy who helped Tim says he once paid for a prostitute who he thought was 20-25 until he saw her cartoony painted toenails and found out she was 14.

This man says he saw a darkness in this girl’s eyes and realized he was the darkness and it made him want to kill himself but God convinced him to help children instead.

The issue of children being forced into sex work - which they continue doing as adults - or even being unable to tell them apart, is compelling because it complicates the idea that sex work is real work that shouldn’t be condemned when so many adults may not have chosen that life.

Ballard, when explaining why he’s trying to rescue Rocio, states “God’s children are not for sale” but that, at least to me, would hit so much harder if we explored how those children continue to live with the burden of being sold, long into adulthood.

Yes, that would take a few minutes to explain and longer to meaningfully deal with in the film but that time was spent on the mythologized jungle adventure so it’s not like this movie was shy with the runtime. I think that complicated and very important aspect of the issue would have served the ostensible mission of the movie - which is to bring awareness to the issue of sex slavery and specifically child sex slavery.

I don’t know, I feel like they were trying too hard to sanctify Tim Ballard as a person and reality is always a lot more nuanced.

There were like three of four different scenes where we see Ballard cry over how terrible things are, because they ARE terrible, and the source material lends itself to the dramatic moments, but it also felt like too much.

There are likewise too many red flags for me to roll with the “this guy is a saint” narrative that’s being presented on screen with the exaggerated portrayals in this film.

The organization he is a member of doesn’t release their financials which puts their credibility into question. They claim to be a charity but nobody can really prove it.

Ballard claims to have all this experience and this record with the DOJ but there’s no real way to prove that either.

Again, I get the “based upon a true story except for the parts that aren’t” and dramatic effect and and and, but it’s still exhausting and all of that lends itself to the argument that a lot of what’s being done, and portrayed, is performative.

I didn’t hate the movie. I was mostly engaged. I found it interesting despite the tedious length with that 4th act simply making the movie too long. When I start to wonder how long a movie is while watching it I tend to get annoyed and some edits were definitely needed.

An example here would be the father of the siblings who were the primary victims in this film, we watch him hang up the phone after getting the news that his children were or were not rescued more than once. They’re okay scenes but they’re redundant for no reason.

We didn’t need to watch him answer the phone AND pick up his son at the airport. Answer the phone AND visit his children at the hospital. We get the same emotions and same sense of dread from the same issue and the same point redundantly without moving the drama or story forward.

One of the more interesting things is that despite all the emotion that we watched this father go through, they made a point in the film to tell us that the kids had been molested. The hospital staff lets Ballard know that the little boy has lacerations that indicate he’d been molested within the prior few days.

Later one of the traffickers says that it’s time to make “some real money” off of Rocio when he sells her to the rebel leader. It isn’t just implied that these young children are being molested, we’re being shown and told this explicitly and told that kids are often sold multiple times a day, several times throughout the film.

And yet despite the well established trauma involved, the issue is entirely glossed over in how the victims OR how their father handles or processes this information. Ok, cool, she’s back in her bedroom playing a drum. It’s all good now, I guess?

That was super weird.

In Taken we’re led to believe that Neeson’s daughter has escaped being raped because she’s such a prize to be sold so the traffickers just trade her up and constantly sell her to the highest bidder - while everybody else on the journey has been drugged and abused and treated like trash.

But in Sound of Freedom we’re led to believe that all of the kids involved haven’t just been molested, it’s happened to them countless times over as many months.

I really didn’t like that they didn’t deal with that aspect of the story. Don’t tell me of the horrors that have been imposed upon these children in any detail and then step back from the implications of said horrors.

These kids, and their father, are going to have PTSD. They need counseling. They need resources and help. This whole situation didn’t end with them being rescued.

This is where diving into the possible cross-over between child victims and adult workers could have been fascinating to explore. It would have been interesting to see what possibly happens next.

That’s another area where I feel like reality was more dramatic than the prototypical film nonsense we were handed.

Finally getting back to the call to action during the credits, I hate to say it but it felt like a grift. I’m not saying it is but it felt like it. The organization Tim Ballard is involved in sells data-mining software and other “support” which means they give money to law enforcement agencies to squander on overtime without verifiable results and that makes the call to action feel more grift like. Grift adjacent if you will.

I’m not saying that’s what is is, but it’s what it felt like.

As a reminder, the “call to action” is to buy movie tickets so an exaggerated movie about a mostly fabricated story can - something something - change things.

Setting the real organization aside, setting the call to action aside, setting the “dramatic effect” nonsense aside - for the movie itself, it was okay.

Caviezel did a good job. If you blinked you wouldn’t even realize Sorvino was in the film. Kurt Fuller, who plays Ballard’s boss, looks to have had all of his scenes shot on the same day because they’re all shot in the same office and he simply changed his tie a few times and took his jacket off. Yes, I know that’s how you save money on a production, but it stood out to me.

Come on guys, take him outside for one of the scenes or something. Anything to break it up, especially with a movie with so many locations.

José Zúñiga did a good, if redundant, job as the distraught father while the children did a passable job as scared or sad, albeit lacking any evidence of being traumatized by what happened to them in the story. Bill Camp played the most interesting character in the film but I found it funny that we’re introduced to him as a man who buys the freedom of children and later Ballard says to him “God’s children are not for sale”. I’m not sure they thought that particular exchange through contextually.

As for the overall plot, the entire impetus of Ballard trying to go down to Columbia to try and save a kid was based upon one conversation and I feel like that should have been explored more in the film. I also would have liked to have seen more setup with his time in the DOJ because that was glossed over too quickly.

The end felt disjoined and the time would have been better spent on the reality of the issues, the trauma involved and giving us more background into the man we’re supposed to be rooting for in the film.

I say all of that because of the way the film is being marketed.

I’m going to say I didn’t hate it but I also didn’t love it. It mostly kept my interest even if I did find myself rolling my eyes from time to time.

I’m going to give it a “Meh”, 3/5 stars.

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