REVIEW: Sound of Freedom (2023)

Movie Reviews

Sound of Freedom is kicking up a big political stir, and while I certainly have my opinions on that score and whether this is an important film to see for social reasons, I’m not going to get into it here. This is about the movie itself, which is the only fair way to appraise any piece of art. And Sound of Freedom is a very good movie, filmed well, acted superbly, and unfolding almost like a dark fairy tale about a knight descending into hell to rescue the innocent. How much of it is 100% true to life is as important as it is when watching Goodfellas, Braveheart, The Untouchables, or Gladiator; it’s a well-told story that embraces film as its platform.

Tim Ballard (Jim Caviezel), a Homeland Security agent who investigates child pornography, is unusually affected by a case and searches for an abducted child. This leads him on an odyssey to rescue as many children as he can from a child trafficking ring based in Colombia, putting together a team of similarly sympathetic allies to save them.

Sound of Freedom is not an easy movie to watch, and that’s an unfortunate necessity. The film is about child trafficking, just the mention of which makes your skin crawl. The scenes depicting what these kids go through are not graphic, thankfully, and they don’t need to be; the suggestion is more than enough. The best comparison I can think of is the beginning of A Time to Kill, where the girl is abducted and assaulted; that scene is actually more graphic than anything in Sound of Freedom, so if you’ve seen it, you can gauge your tolerance by that. The tradeoff is that there’s more of it in this film. I completely understand people who don’t want to see it for this reason; it’s tough to sit through evil like this. But if you can stomach it, the movie gets more hopeful, uplifting, and even satisfying in some places. The darkness is necessary to appreciate the light.

That journey is explored through Tim Ballard, and Jim Caviezel is excellent in the lead role. Ballard begins the film as a twelve-year veteran of Homeland Security, dismissive of the underlying evil propping up the people he arrests and rationalizing that once the local pedophile is caught, his job is done. But all it takes is one tug of the heartstrings to change a man, and when he looks into the child a recent suspect was trying to buy, he can’t let it go, and his journey begins. Caviezel effectively portrays the many versions of Ballard as he evolves throughout Sound of Freedom, starting with the jaded professional and ultimately becoming a determined crusader. The more difficult parts are between those points, where Ballard investigates the child traffickers. He’s undercover a lot of the time, and he has to pretend to be a pedophile, and you can see on Caviezel’s face what it’s doing to Ballard to speak the way he must, to use the language of evil as a weapon against it.

As he delves further into the investigation – and farther off the Homeland Security reservation – Ballard assembles a team of compatriots to help him liberate the enslaved children. One of them is a surprise, a character who, when he’s first described, I was sure was a rung on the trafficking ladder, but is entirely different when the breadth of what he’s been doing is revealed. I don’t want to ruin it, but he’s played by Bill Camp, who’s been in Lincoln, Jason Bourne, Public Enemies, and plenty of other movies, and he’s terrific. Camp gives him humor, a certain amount of weariness, and in a fantastic scene between him and Caviezel, a massive, beating heart. The others aren’t quite as colorful (one is Ballard’s sympathetic boss, played by veteran character actor Kurt Fuller); what makes them interesting is the way Ballard is able to appeal to them when they waver. It’s not Ballard himself so much as being confronted by the horror of what’s happening to the children and the feeling of knowing they can help and that they’d never sleep again if they refused. Mira Sorvino, as Ballard’s wife, is a bit part, but her support is refreshing; Sound of Fury doesn’t go for the cheap conflict of having her naysay for two hours.

The filmmaking is a lot better than I expected. This may be unfair, but this is a small, niche movie, or at least those are the conditions under which it was filmed, and I wasn’t anticipating a lot on that front. But Sound of Freedom is shot well, with some good images of the characters in different settings. An early conversation between Ballard and his Homeland Security partner takes place in a car, and it starts from behind with the two agents backlit and in shadows before cutting to the front and having them in the light, telegraphing Ballard’s arc in the film. Another of Ballard at home, sitting at the dining room table while flanked by his kids, illustrates his guilt, knowing how much he has and how lucky he is while the children he can’t shake from his mind suffer. Later, a scene is told from a kidnapped girl’s perspective, and the screen goes dark as her eyes shut, then comes to life again when she opens them. There’s a lot more artistry at play than you may think.

The film itself is surprising because it isn’t a “message movie,” something there only to educate so it feels like homework. Sound of Freedom is a real movie, and it functions well as a crime thriller, with some suspenseful scenes as Ballard makes his way through the underworld. The various scenarios he and his partners concoct to rescue the kids are reminiscent of movies like Argo or even Ocean’s Eleven with these elaborate schemes and false identities. The score enhances the plot, increasing the tension to remind us what the characters always have at the forefront of their minds: the kids are on the line. It also never delves into politics, save for one comment about the hurdles of bureaucracy; neither political party is ever mentioned, so no one is blamed because it’s not about that. It isn’t heavy-handed with religious messages, either; religion is mentioned twice that I recall, in vague terms, one being the now-famous “God’s children are not for sale” that became the film’s tagline. (This is part of an excellent scene.) This movie earns any audience member who goes to see it, regardless of who they are.

Sound of Freedom is sometimes hard to watch, sometimes exciting, sometimes satisfying, but always gripping and hopeful of a better world where evil like child trafficking is no longer tolerated. If you can handle the disturbing subject matter, it’s a well-made thriller that’s timelier than anyone wants to believe.