But that mainstream accessibility makes it valuable as a recruitment tool, much as generic “ Save the Children” campaigns proved gateways to far-right conspiracy theories about a secret cabal of evil elites conducting blood rituals. The actor has taken to repeating the most grotesque falsehoods of the sprawling QAnon ideology, among them that traffickers are harvesting children’s organs and extracting the chemical compound adrenochrome from their brains before murdering them.Ĭompared to this nonsense, Sound of Freedom is relatively grounded in our universe. She, too, evidently had a personal stake in joining this film, telling the Washington Examiner this week that she has “met so many child survivors and my heart burns for them.”Īs implausible as the movie is - it invents a finale where Ballard journeys deep into a jungle alone to pluck a girl from the clutches of guerrilla militants, which he accomplishes by posing as a doctor distributing cholera vaccines - one wonders if it was extreme enough for Caviezel’s liking. ![]() And if Mira Sorvino, who plays his wife Katherine, spent more than a day on set, you’d never know it: she’s there for all of two minutes, offering brief words of encouragement while Ballard spends weeks undercover as a louche sex tourist in Central America. The unambiguous hero of the piece, Ballard invokes parenthood as his motivation or an argument to get the cooperation he wants - “What if it was your daughter?” is practically his catchphrase - yet aside from a dialogue-free breakfast scene, he never interacts with his offspring. Performance-wise, he’s stuck on a note of world-historical grief, either crying or staring with bloodshot eyes as he attempts to convey the scale and weight of the tragedy before him. ![]() Then you have Caviezel, bleached blond to match Ballard’s buff, clean-cut Mormon profile. 'Sound of Freedom' Fans Shrug Off Arrest of Donor for Child Kidnapping embellishes and misrepresents their international “missions,” according to a Vice News investigation of the group. The same muddled approach is taken to Ballard’s later, more sensational busts, which is certainly in keeping with the way O.U.R. When the guy fulfills his end of the bargain, Ballard has a dozen police officers swarm the diner they’re in to… arrest him again? Wait, how was he sprung from custody in the first place? Doesn’t matter as long as the drooling creep with requisite glasses and pervert mustache gets his head slammed against a table once more. Lucky! Earlier, Ballard convinces an imprisoned child porn peddler facing a sentence of 30 years to help him contact traffickers in exchange for an immunity deal, needlessly posing as a pedophile himself to gain trust. That original rescue is only possible because Ballard is standing at the exact right spot of a U.S.-Mexico border station at the very moment his target tries to cross. It’s straight-up QAnon stuff, right down to his use of catchphrases like “ The storm is upon us.” Here, he gets to act out some of that drama by playing a fictionalized version of Tim Ballard, head of the anti-sex trafficking nonprofit Operation Underground Railroad (O.U.R.), in a feature film that casts the operator as a Batman-style savior for kids sold into the sex trade.Īpart from its relentless messaging, the movie is hobbled by a near-total absence of procedural logic. But this crowd, I could tell, would view the events depicted over the next two-plus hours as entirely literal.Ĭaviezel, best known for being tortured to death in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, has become a prominent figure on the conspiracist right, giving speeches and interviews in which he hints at an underground holy war between patriots and a sinister legion of evildoers who are harvesting the blood of children. For the seasoned moviegoer, this phrase is a joke - we know that cinema will stretch almost any “truth” to the breaking point - and the rank insincerity of such a pronouncement is the foundation of the prankish opening titles of Fargo. ![]() The familiar words had appeared on screen, and an elderly man had taken it upon himself to read them aloud, to the rest of a sizable audience seated for a matinee showing of the anti- child-trafficking thriller Sound of Freedom, starring Jim Caviezel. “Based on a true story,” I heard from somewhere across the theater.
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