SOUND OF FREEDOM ★
(M) 131 minutes
“It’s a messed-up world,” a minor character observes near the start of Sound of Freedom, Alejandro Monteverde’s piously sensationalised thriller about the battle against child sex traffickers. Thankfully, there are men who have what it takes to clean up some portion of the mess – men like our hero Tim Ballard, played by Jim Caviezel, looking blonder but hardly less noble than he did as the lead in The Passion of the Christ.
Jim Caviezel plays real-life Homeland Security agent Tim Ballard in Sound of Freedom.Credit: Angel Studios
As a Homeland Security investigator in California, Ballard spends his days poring over horrific images of abuse to catch the creeps who share this material over the internet. Understandably, this takes an emotional toll, despite the support of his devoted wife (Mira Sorvino, who gets about three lines).
At the end of his rope, he decides to travel down to Colombia to confront the source of the evil, joining forces with a jovial former cartel accountant (Bill Camp) who has darkness in his past but shares Ballard’s conviction “God’s children are not for sale”.
This is, in theory, a true story – but it depends on what you want to believe. While Ballard is an actual person, many of his public statements about his career have recently been called into question (as of last month, he’s no longer CEO of Operation Underground Railroad, the anti-trafficking non-profit he founded in 2013).
Moreover, he’s admitted that his portrayal here employs more than a little artistic license, especially when Caveziel swings into action hero mode. Nor should the film be taken as a reliable guide to the realities of human trafficking, the bulk of which occurs for reasons unrelated to paedophilia.
Just the same, Sound of Freedom has been a breakout hit in the US, especially with Christian audiences. Some have also perceived a link with the outlandish conspiracy theories of the QAnon movement – and while Monteverde has protested that the film was completed way back in 2019, there’s no denying he’s pushing many of the same buttons.
Though slickly made and never too openly lurid, at its core this is the simplest kind of exploitation movie, in which a stance of righteous indignation supplies an alibi for a fascination with hidden evil, linked in turn with a fear of corrupt foreigners (Monteverde is Mexican, though based in the US).
The ugliness of this comes through most plainly in the cloying treatment of the child actors, the camera dwelling on their innocent faces even as we’re prompted to picture them subjected to horrors off-screen.
As he gets closer to the heart of darkness, the stoic but agonised Ballard starts to recall many troubled heroes or anti-heroes of US cinema, from John Wayne in The Searchers to Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo.
The difference is this premise leaves virtually no room for moral ambiguity, at least of an overt kind.
It’s true that to defeat his enemies, Ballard has to pretend to share their wicked desires. But we’re not encouraged to wonder, even for a moment, if he might also be battling demons of his own.
Sound of Freedom is in cinemas from August 24.
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