Although Sound of Freedom was completed half a decade ago, the film has only been released this Fourth of July. Netflix and Amazon passed on the thriller, and 21st Century Fox and Disney both reneged on distribution deals. Instead, it’s the conservative, crowdfunded Angel Studios that has ultimately brought the movie to the big screen, and it is marquee conservative stars who have been on an advertising blitz for the film.
But despite its backers and its critics, Sound of Freedom is not conservative, at least in the contemporary political parlance. If anything, liberals will find a lot to love in this rescue story centered on captured and sex-trafficked children from South America.
SOUND OF FREEDOM: THE FILM YOU ALMOST NEVER HAD THE CHANCE TO SEE
The story’s protagonist is DHS agent Tim Ballard, played by Jim Caviezel of The Passion of the Christ, only in the same way that Nick Carraway is the lead character of The Great Gatsby. The film indeed fictionalizes the real-life Ballard’s account of leaving the DHS to run Operation Underground Railroad, a nonprofit group that performs sex-trafficking sting and rescue missions. But whereas a lesser film would focus on the white savior at the expense of a moving morass of unnamed and unidentified children, Sound of Freedom centers on Rocio, an 11-year-old girl from Honduras, from the film’s opening frame to its last.
The story moves in three phases. First, it establishes the brutalist bureaucracy of the federal government and the crisis of child pornography consumption here at home. The film then focuses on the trafficking that festers in urban centers such as Cartagena, after which it finally transitions to the literal and figurative jungle of Colombian red zones, where the dominance of drug cartels means that even the local law enforcement helping Ballard will not enter. (Mild spoilers ahead.)
All along, although Ballard is our hero, expertly played by a passionate and pained Caviezel, Rocio and her family are our emotional foci. After Ballard saves Rocio’s younger brother Miguel by befriending a pedophile and pretending to be a double agent, Ballard cannot rest until he reunites Rocio with her family. Ballard succeeds in saving 54 children during a high-stakes sting operation that cajoles Colombia’s elite traffickers into submission, but Rocio isn’t one of those who are saved. Rather than head back to the DHS, which demands an end to Ballard’s operation, he quits his job to embark on what looks like a suicide mission to save Rocio.
Mira Sorvino, who was famously once blackballed by Harvey Weinstein, stars in a supporting role as Ballard’s wife Katherine, and Bill Camps turns in a poignant and (at times) humorous performance as a reformed money launderer and womanizer who becomes Ballard’s local partner-in-crimebusting. But the best performance second to Caviezel’s comes from Cristal Aparicio, the young Colombian actress who plays Rocio.
Whatever QAnon flirtations Ballard and Caviezel may or may not have engaged in, no semblance of conspiracy theory has made it into the final cut of Sound of Freedom. If anything, it’s a film that, in the #MeToo heyday, would have been feted as a masterclass of the genre. If there is any correct and ethical way to illustrate something as traumatic as systemic child rape on film, Sound of Freedom is it. Perhaps if left-leaning viewers ignore the greater culture war and focus on the actual one — criminal cartels trafficking immigrant children of color — they will find much that resonates.
