Movie info via Rotten Tomatoes:
Sound of Freedom, based on the incredible true story, shines a light on even the darkest of places. After rescuing a young boy from ruthless child traffickers, a federal agent learns the boy’s sister is still captive and decides to embark on a dangerous mission to save her. With time running out, he quits his job and journeys deep into the Colombian jungle, putting his life on the line to free her from a fate worse than death.
Review:
Sound of Freedom is not a subtle film. It pounds its child kidnapping theme with unrelenting melodrama.
The big difference between SOF and a Liam Neeson actioneer is that Neeson is a father who happens to be a government agent and Jim Caviezel’s Tim Ballard is a government agent with fatherly Liam Neeson tendency.
Ballard’s film kin is really Robert de DeNiro’s Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver. They’re both on the conservative side of the political spectrum, and their respective movies also feature child sexual exploitation main plots. Bickle is an outsider. Ballard is an insider intimately familiar and emotionally moved to action by the situation. Eventually, SOF merges Ballard into Bickle, making him the saving saint of sexually exploited children, the hero. Bickle always remain an antihero, a savior only in his mind, not through his warped actions, which bring only mayhem and destruction and a temporary relief.
There’s also a creepiness which successfully visualized in Taxi Driver but tried on and abandoned in SOF. Taxi Driver is the American side of the sex trafficking equation. SOF can’t see the part where Americans are selling their children into sexual slavery. For them, it’s an imported problem only, like migrants crossing the border and Mexican and Colombian drug cartels.
Travis Bickle cruises the streets and sees scum and corruption, a fallen world with precious little hope. Ballard, being a saint, sees the tears of children crying for help and the necessity of putting hope into action to save them. Never mind that the first five minutes featuring children flaunting faux sexuality as they posture like cover models is a milder form of that same exploitation, sort of a gateway drug. SOF perspective is inherently more religious and Christian, thus its small moments of moral hypocrisy stand out. In Taxi Driver that hypocrisy functions as ironic commentary and the main point.
SOF constantly cheats on this conception of the Christian hero. The main action is a raid that saves 54 children that are saved from a world class pedophile resort, but not the two main children who are the focus of Ballard’s children’s crusade. They get their own anti-climactic rescue from rebel forces in the film’s Rambo style climax. That’s an extra twenty minutes to make a point made in the first raid.
SOF only knows, shows and sees its own melodramatic piety. The police procedural process requires them to square the piety with the hard truth of the world that the procedural form needs to show in unnerving detail. The reconciliation forces the abandonment of the process and submission to genre conventions more amenable and adaptable to SOF main moral conscious. SOF has to die on its own cross.
Sound of Freedom gets a 3.0 out of 5 or a B. It’s streaming on Amazon Prime.
Credits:
Directed by
Written by
- Rod Barr
- Alejandro Monteverde
Produced by
Starring
Cinematography
- Gorka Gómez
- Andreu Aec
Edited by
Brian Scofield
Music by
Production
company
Santa Fe Films
Distributed by
Release date
- July 4, 2023
Running time
131 minutes[1]
Country
United States
Languages
- English
- Spanish
Budget
$14.5 million
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