Um, Journos? Calling "Sound of Freedom" A QAnon Movie Is A Lazy, Hateful Cop-Out.
We all know there’s been a lot of buzz about Sound of Freedom in the mainstream media lately, and most of it is infuriating. It’s no secret that many people of a certain persuasion pretend to be tolerant while also framing dissenting voices as “disinformation” and calling for wiping out the opposition. When a story like Sound of Freedom comes around, these self-styled “tolerant” individuals act like Dracula when he sees a crucifix.
For those who may not know what Sound of Freedom is about, it’s the true story of former Department of Homeland Security agent Tim Ballard. Tim is in the business of catching pedophiles, but when a colleague asks him, “We’re catching the pedos, but what are we doing about the kids?”
This gives Tim pause, but in the meantime, he mounts a sting operation involving one of the pedos he caught, and in so doing he rescues a little Honduran boy named Miguel Aguilar, who, along with his sister, Rocio, was sold into sex slavery.
Miguel tells Tim about how he and Rocio were recruited by a supposed talent scout to do some modeling. Their dad, who is extremely flattered, brings the kids by bus to a hotel, where the woman has a room. There are a lot of kids but, and here’s the first big red flag, there are no parents.
The woman tells Mr. Aguilar to return at seven PM sharp, but when he does, he finds to his absolute horror that the room is empty and all the children are gone. Meanwhile, his kids are packed in a shipping crate with other children and sent to Columbia.
Right off the bat, I noticed something interesting about this part of the film. After Mr. Aguilar leaves his children the camera focuses head-on at the closed door for what feels like a long minute and we don’t hear children talking, laughing or crying. Nothing. Just the deep, ominous silence and secrecy. Later, when Mr. Aguilar realizes his children have been taken, he runs terrified down an eerily empty street. He’s completely alone. Who will help him? Who will believe him?
Miguel, who is terrified at having told Tim so much about his experiences, begs Tim to go after his sister. From there Tim ventures into the dark, repulsive underworld of child sex trafficking, and we have to wonder how tribal he’s going to have to get in his quest to bring Rocio back. There will be more sting operations and time is of the essence, because she could disappear without warning and never heard from again.
Sound of Freedom continually keeps the audience guessing as to how much horror they will see, but it never blows its wad. We see one scene when a man who is about to sexually assault a young girl takes off his belt and begins to unzip his jeans, and for one horrible minute we pray for something to stop what is about to happen.
The general atmosphere of the movie is hurry-up-and-wait with a side of constantly building tension. Ballard’s story is presented mostly accurately, sometimes in the actual locations where these events occured, and amazingly enough, it shows Ballard rescuing fewer children in those early missions than he did in real life. This was done because the movie was getting too long, but it almost feels like mercy because we’re given a lot to think about.
Fortunately there’s a bit of comic relief in several places, mostly between Tim and his righthand man, Vampiro, and it breaks the tension just enough to have somewhere to go. Oh, and some of the traffickers smile like psychotic freaks as if their faces were frozen that way, which is creepy and slightly funny all at once because it seems a bit stereotypical.
Jim Caviezel’s performance in this movie is note perfect, and I have to wonder how much acting he did here because his eyes look haunted for most of the movie. It’s Oscar-worthy, it really is.
Sound of Freedom was originally made by Twentieth Century Fox in 2018, but the project was shelved when Disney bought the studio because Disney flatly refused to release it. Producer Eduardo Verastegui worked for a year to acquire the rights, but then COVID hit and everything shut down, and it wasn’t until Angel Studios crowdfunded its release that the film was let out of the vault. Ironic, isn’t it? Sound of Freedom had to be rescued in order to see the light of day.
And what does the mainstream media do? While some of them are more honest than others, maybe grudgingly so, service after service after service after service dismiss the film as a “QAnon fantasy” or “QAnon adjacent.” Never mind that the script was written in 2015 and filmed in 2018, long before QAnon was a Leftist dog whistle, but hey, that’s just a technicality, right? Meh, who needs facts?
The vitriol doesn’t stop there, of course. According to the media, those who see the film are somehow deluding themselves into thinking seeing the movie means they’re doing something about child trafficking. Not to mention they’re probably “white nationalist” and “alt-right,” as well, because those are two of the media’s go-to insults even though they’re completely baseless and thoughtless.
Shame on the mainstream media. Really, truly, shame on them. Anyone who lives in a border state and doesn’t walk around with their eyes shut knows that human trafficking is a pervasive, evil thing. Anyone who says that human trafficking isn’t real is lying through their teeth. They know it’s real. Anyone who is in favor of open borders and lax immigration laws aids and abets human traffickers.
In fact, it’s estimated that twenty-seven percent of all human trafficking victims worldwide are children, but in the United States, the percentage of children who are trafficked is thought to be thirty-four as of 2022. According to the Human Trafficking Institute, ninety-six percent of all human trafficking victims in new cases in the United States in 2022 were sex slaves and four percent were made to work in forced labor.
The media’s reaction is by no means a shock, because look at who owns these companies. Many media moguls and others in the entertainment industry hung out with Jeffrey Epstein. Look at all the companies that use migrant children for labor. These are the kids we know about, though. What about the ones we don’t know about? This is not a partisan issue, as Owen Gleiberman of Variety has pointed out.
Not only that, but as Savannah Edwards of This Is Savvy speculated on Instagram, the film was made by people who have seen Hollywood’s underbelly and who have no doubt heard the codewords used by executives for children, such as “chicken” and “pizza.” I’m sure Corey Feldman heard them at one time or another, which is why he has had to be cautious in how much information he lets slip about the film industry.
That’s why Sound of Freedom is so important, and that’s why the media is so butthurt. It exposes them for who they are and what they do behind closed doors.
Plus they can’t stand that a movie like this would cream Indiana Jones in its opening week, with showings selling out not only based on plain and simple word of mouth, but people buying blocks of tickets so as many viewers as possible can see it.
Ordinarily, the vast majority of mainstream media journalists treat Christian or faith-based films with either condescending indulgence or gloating smugness, depending on the quality of the film. They hate Jim Caviezel and would love for Sound of Freedom to be a cliched sermon tricked out as a mediocre movie like so many Christian films have been. No doubt it makes them angrier that the film follows in the footsteps of Jesus Revolution and His Only Son, two other movies the media would have loved to have seen fail.
Since Sound of Freedom isn’t specifically Christian or mediocre, just about a topic they would prefer to stay hidden, the media resorts to outright lying and journalistic laziness when they should be eating humble pie with bitter sauce.
“This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.”—John 3:19-21 (NIV)
Sound of Freedom is currently in theaters. Rated PG-13.
My grade: A+
Principal Cast: Jim Caviezel, Mira Sorvino, Bill Camp, Jose Zuniga, Kurt Fuller, Verastegui, Gerardo Taracena, Scott Haze, Alanna De La Rossa, Gary Basaraba, Yessica Borroto Perryman, Manny Perez, Javier Godino, James Quattrochi, Gustavo Sanches Parra, Ariel Sierra, Eduardo Gomez Monteverde, Gustavo Angarita, Jr.
Directed by Alejandro Monteverde.
Written by Rod Barr and Alejandro Monteverde