An uncomfortable watch, Sound of Freedom is based on the life of paedophile hunter and former CIA and Homeland Security agent Tim Ballard and details the realities of child sex trafficking in and around the US. Since its release, the film has become a flashpoint for cultural quarrels.
Sound of Freedom opens with Roberto, a Honduran father to Miguel and Rocio, being approached by a former beauty queen, who tells him his children may have what it takes to make it in the entertainment industry. Buoyed by this news, the proud and aspiring Roberto takes his children to what he is told is an audition and is asked to return a few hours later. When he does, the room is empty – his children and their captors are gone.
Moments later, we meet Tim Ballard – played by Jim Caviezel, best known for his turn as Jesus in Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ – as he prepares to take down Ernst Oshinsky, a distributor of child pornography, as he sends his “spring sampler” to his audience.
Following the capture of Oshinksy, Ballard is able to save Miguel and reunite him with his father. Learning of Rocio’s fate, Ballard goes to Columbia to track her down with the help of a well-meaning cast of philanthropists, local law enforcement officers and rogues alike – and in the face of challenges from reluctant bureaucracies at home and overseas.
As Ballard’s investigation progresses, the audience is subjected to a stomach-turning ride through the logistics of the child-trafficking trade, much of it seen through the eyes of Rocio. From grooming to abduction, from smuggling to business meetings between traffickers and much worse.
Director-writer Alejandro Monteverde’s dialogue is peppered with statistics about the child trafficking trade, which give us a sense of its frightening scale, just as his lingering shots on the abducted and brutalised children give its victims faces.
Much of it set to haunting choral song, Monteverde’s emotional manipulation is extremely effective. He beats his audience into intense disgust, rage and hope. It’s not exactly subtle, but subtlety has little place in the debate, least of all in its characters.
The quiet and intense sincerity of Caviziel’s performance as strait-laced Ballard and the boisterous, roguish charm of Bill Camp’s Vampiro – a former drug cartel accountant who now saves children from trafficking – are a case in point.
The casting and wardrobe of these two extremely different characters are a perfect representation of their roles in the film: the devout and inspired crusader and the conflicted and self-disgusting convert.
If anything, the effect becomes even clearer in less significant characters. Actors seem to have been chosen for their sinister looks and made up and dressed to accentuate their most villainous features.
Here, good and evil are rooted in the individual character, not their origins or other immutable characteristics. Reluctant bureaucracies, sordid criminals and the decent hard-working parent exist on both sides of the US border. It is a small thing, but the sense of individual decency and malevolence is a striking and refreshing take on putting good and evil on screen.
Monteverde’s films often bear signs of Christian faith. The direct quotation of Mark 18:6 (on children and millstones) being the most obvious nod to Christianity; Vampiro’s enigmatic journey from drug dealer to vigilante, buying child slaves only to free them reveal a heartening if haunting redemption arc.
In a private moment between Ballard and Vampiro, having suffered a setback to their plans, Vampiro explains what drew him to the light. He explains that having finished a prison sentence for his crimes, it was only days before he was drawn back into the criminal underworld. But, unexpectedly confronted by his own depravity, he sees the light. After explaining his Damascene conversion, he turns to Ballard and tells him: “When God tells you what to do, you cannot hesitate.”
Long before its 4 July release in the US, Sound of Freedom had become a source of controversy. It met with strong box office numbers but mixed reviews. Much of the American right, including Donald Trump, have thrown their weight behind it, while many on the left consider it a “QAnon fever dream” – a nod to the QAnon theory that the “global elite” are implicated in a mass child-trafficking ring.
And while Monteverde doesn’t shy away from mentioning billionaires’ free rein on their private islands, the suggestion of traffickers taking children to Los Angeles, or to using “God’s children are not for sale” as part of the film’s choral soundtrack in an apparent echo of QAnon slogans, is it enough to condemn the film?
Watched from this side of the pond where QAnon’s roots are shallower, the answer is no. Less so in the US, where Jim Caviezel has repeated QAnon talking points and theories in speeches and interviews.
As thrillers go, Sound of Freedom is OK. But the film’s reception and politicisation betrays the fact that it has fallen into a tedious but familiar pattern. As a film nodding to certain right-wing values and talking points, conservatives love it and liberals hate it.
The film is neither phenomenal nor terrible, but cultural critics on both right and left appear to be as lacking in objectivity as the political adversaries that they so pompously deride. If anything, they’ve added fuel to the fires they claim to want put out.
Sound of Freedom is in cinemas now.
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