Sound of Freedom ★★

SOUND of Freedom doesn’t warrant the controversy or success it has enjoyed to date.

After an interesting first act it becomes very much a run-of-the-mill crime drama with uneven acting and script and slowly shuffles to its climax.

The marketing machine was in over-drive for this film and, all the claims of associations with the Q’ Anon movement and its conspiracy theories aside, I was expecting something far edgier and compelling.

Jim Caviezel plays the real-life Tim Ballard, a former U.S. government agent who quits his job in the specialist child protection unit, disillusioned at putting perpetrators in prison but rarely managing to rescue victims.

Ballard becomes obsessed by the case of two kidnapped Honduran children at the same time as he travels to Columbia where he joins a privately-funded organisation dedicated to infiltrating sex trafficking operations in a way that ensures as many victims as possible are freed.

The great Bill Camp is the highlight of the film playing a former drug cartel accountant named ‘Vampiro’ who has seen the light and is now running the anti-trafficking group.

The film has been criticised for many things, not the least of which is the claim that it hypocritically focuses too much on imagery of the child victims.

I didn’t see that. My criticisms of the film are, firstly, it isn’t dramatic, thrilling or compelling enough and, secondly, it isn’t about what the publicity claims. There may be rich, depraved Western backers of the sex trade in the shadows, but that’s where they remain. All the villains we see Ballard going after are sweaty, money-hungry Latinos.

But most importantly, the film’s only point seems to be that sex-trafficking and child abuse are bad and we should be against them. Well, duh.