Sound of Freedom: A Heavy-Handed if Noble Thriller

Over the course of the last few years, I've become more and more aware of the fact that there's a very thin sheen of perceived politeness gracefully applied over the top of how news publishers and journalists present themselves in their writing. And sometimes, a particularly contentious topic will come along and reveal these people to be the rude, insensitive, impartial beings they actually are, and if just for a moment, we as the general public get to see the true faces of these writers before they quickly go back to faking a smile for us. People who know me know that I'm a genuine guy who can't stand fake people, and for all the uncomfortable and unusual situations and problems my notorious and simultaneously much-loved genuineness causes, you'll never have to worry that the me I present in public and in my writing isn't actually the real me. Why am I bringing this topic up at the start of a review for a movie, you may ask? Well, I believe that for all of its flaws, Angel Studio's sleeper hit Sound of Freedom really showed us how artificially polite a lot of these journalists really are. One of my personal favorite examples of this phenomenon was written by Yahoo News. The caption of this particular article reads, and I quote, "Sound of Freedom Is a Superhero Movie for Dads With Brainworms." Not that the simpletons at Yahoo know anything about film criticism in the first place, but I hope that this example helps illustrate my point. Why even try to be polite anymore when you're clearly not? Well now that I say that, coming out of another election cycle, I think that maybe I need to be careful what I ask for. Anyways, is Sound of Freedom a good movie? Unfortunately, it's not, even if its heart may be in the right place, and so even if the critiques of all of these journalists may be more concerned with juvenile politics and possibly sinister ulterior motives, and less concerned with a more timeless, objective, and story-oriented focus, that doesn't somehow make this movie automatically well-written. It's got a lot of problems that hold it back from greatness, and so even if I may be all for sex traffickers getting thrown in prison, the critic in me wishes they could have made a better movie about it instead of the unsubtle and forceful one we actually got.

To let you know what the movie's about, Angel Studio's unexpected 2023 box office hit Sound of Freedom follows the real-life exploits of Tim Ballard, a special agent for U.S. Homeland Security, who strikes out in search of a trafficked girl named Rocío after Miguel, a young boy whom he rescues from sex slavery, asks him to save his sister from her captors as well.

Sound of Freedom is a lot of things, but subtle is unfortunately not one of them, and this lack of subtlety pervades nearly everything about the film, right down to the visuals. The look of this film is very utilitarian, and I noticed that any time streetlights are in the shot, the image looks very washed-out. Luckily enough, this isn't a problem with indoor scenes, which are oddly enough, very well-lit as opposed to a lot of scenes set outdoors, and this makes me wonder if the film editors just didn't think their color-grading through as well as they could have. Granted, this general lack of subtlety that does go beyond the visuals of Sound of Freedom does have its moments, namely in the opening credits of the movie, which features footage of actual child abductions. It's wildly disturbing stuff, and it needs to be for a movie like this work, which sometimes it does, but more often than not, it unfortunately doesn't. I think my biggest issue with Sound of Freedom is it's, as I mentioned in the title of this article, pervasively heavy-handed. Of course, a sense of heaviness comes with the subject matter, and I wonder why director Alejandro Gómez Monteverde and the rest of the crew involved just let this inherent heaviness speak for itself instead of insisting on using a really distracting score that ultimately detracts from the film in some pretty significant ways. On the level of the film's narrative, it's unfortunately kind of a mess as well. The film has too many long, expository sequences in the first act that could have and should have been handled with more grace than they were granted.

That said, Sound of Freedom does start to pick up in its second act, and as some of Ballard's concrete goals get laid out for us as the viewers to see, the film gains something of a head of steam and gives the story more of a narrative purpose, makes it finally get moving, and breaths some unexpected life into Sound of Freedom. I noted that the second half of this movie feels very much like the movie the filmmakers wanted to make, and the first half feels like unnecessary expository sequences that didn't add a whole lot to the end product. However, the film does use a couple of effective visual cues in its second half, and this does a bit to lessen the blow. That said, though this movie is ultimately a deeply flawed piece, I personally find it hard to critique for two reasons. The first is because of its obvious genuineness, and the second is that when it was released, every last film-criticism-illiterate journalist had to open their loud mouths to give an opinion on the movie, and I don't really want to sound like I'm contributing to that dialogue in any way, so I hope you'll be understanding enough of my laying out of what I believe to be perfectly legitimate critiques to grant me a pass from being lumped in with reactionary journalists who don't know how to say anything meaningful about the art of film criticism.

But once it was all over and the fat lady had sung, this movie moves from a messy first half to an okay second one, and I think that stripping back a lot of the heavy-handed messaging and overpowering score would have scored it some extra points. Don't get me wrong here, Sound of Freedom certainly has its heart in the right place, and a lot of the complaints leveled at it by non-film-critic journalists who offend me by pretending to know anything about an art form I love so dearly have been completely irrelevant to the actual quality of the film, completely missing the point of film criticism. Nevertheless, graceless filmmaking doesn't automatically become good because of an intellectually lacking reaction, and Sound of Freedom is ultimately a film that could have used a generous dose of subtlety, even if the media's reaction to this film often looks very much like what some would call a Freudian slip. It's almost like a lot of these publishers have a personal stake in the matter, if you know what I mean. I'm sorry, but the entertainment industry and the news industry are rife with all kinds of weird kinks, and if you don't believe that, I don't know what to tell you. All in all, the whole situation just leaves a really bad taste in my mouth, because this movie is too dark to act as escapism and yet too forceful to portray the subject matter it wants to with any manner of grace, and so for me, it falls into this weird cinematic twilight zone of unwanted significance. Its message is an urgent and noble one, but it's one that could and should have been portrayed with far more finesse. On the other hand, a lot of the reactions to the film were rightfully negative but came with an unprofessional and even suspiciously aggressive edge to them. To phrase it more simply, these publishers took this movie on the level of a personal attack for no reason other than if they have a personal stake in the matter, and movies like this do make me wonder if we're about to enter a new era in Hollywood's history, one where we as the general public become more aware of the degeneracy that happens behind the doors of the celebrities we as an American society worship, for better or worse.

As Kendrick Lamar put it so bluntly in his Meet The Grahams diss track, "I been in this industry twelve years, I'ma tell y'all one lil' secret. There's some weird sh*t goin' on, and some of these artists be here to police it."

Indeed.

Sound of Freedom - 5/10

Mark 9:42