Sound of Freedom is sailing toward $100 mil without breaking a sweat. It topped all Hollywood blockbusters, from Disney’s catastrophe, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, to Insidious, to Jennifer Lawrence’s middling sex comedy, No Hard Feelings. Only Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning could top it.
For a film that cost just $14.5 million, Sound of Freedom is rounding the bases and humiliating Hollywood by the minute, as if to say - what, like it’s hard?
They have one job in Hollywood: tell a great story. Why would they expect people to turn out if they can't even do that?
Hollywood and those who cover Hollywood have lost the trust of the American public, who have begun to rely more on audience ratings at Rotten Tomatoes and word of mouth rather than critics. They’ve been burned too many times: mindless franchise movies or agonizing navel-gazing narcissism about identity - going to the movies has become a chore most would rather skip.
The disconnect here between the critics and the audience is laughable. And telling. “Yet not free of issues” is hilarious. The audience has it right. Hollywood would do better to start listening to them instead.
Listening to audiences is what Hollywood has done for decades. It’s only recently that they’ve decided to trust the gatekeepers more, to get those juicy headlines and online engagements with Gen-Z. But this has all but wrecked their brand.
It’s a little like this scene in a movie made at a time when Hollywood still told great stories, Bull Durham. Tim Robbins wants to “bring heat,” and “announce” his “presence with authority.” But he is not listening to his catcher, Kevin Costner.
Hollywood could learn a lesson or two from Bull Durham, both in its absolutely unqualified excellence and in its message in that scene, “don’t think, just throw.”
And that is what Sound of Freedom does. Its mission is not to scold its audience or to redefine how they see gender roles in society, but to tell a great story, not to mention celebrate Tim Ballard as an American hero who risked his life to save kids from the clutches of predators.
And therein lies the point of entry for the gatekeepers. The Left mostly exists huddled inside their fear bunker. They are consumed by paranoia, their imagination takes them to dark places, and for some reason, people give them microphones, jobs at media outlets, and cable news shows. In this case, because pedophiles are involved, and because the film was only given a chance to be seen on the Right, it must be Q’anon!
Sound of Freedom is not just a true story, but it was written years before Q’anon rose to prominence as yet another of our media’s favorite scapegoats. Do you think that stopped them from attempting to discredit the film? Why were they so threatened? Because that’s their default in the post-Trump era: attack first, ask questions later. But their hysteria backfired spectacularly, bringing more attention to the film, not less.
They aren’t trying to discredit the movie because it’s bad. They know it isn’t. They were going after it because it succeeded despite the media machine that micromanages Hollywood and everything else the Left controls. In the end, they did more to discredit themselves.
Thankfully, most of the critics on Youtube have heard the media hysteria and responded to it, like Critical Drinker.
For those who didn’t know already that the media has been gaslighting all of us for quite some time, the disconnect between the movie itself and the media narrative might be a wake-up call for them, the same way the Summer of 2020 was for me.
The best movies have captured some of those wake-up calls in unforgettable ways.
Ingrid Bergman in Notorious realizes for the first time her husband’s family is poisoning her - Nazis who now need her dead.
Daniel Day-Lewis, in The Age of Innocence, when he realizes for the first time that everyone around him believes he’s having an affair with Michelle Pfeiffer’s character.
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it, and you’ll never be the same.
The Biden administration, and their praetorian guard media, are threatened by this film doing well because it targets their border policy. Astonishingly, the cognitive dissonance of people who pretend to care about the migrants yet continue to turn a blind eye to the ongoing sexual abuse of women and children in the human trafficking industry, means predators are taking full advantage of our open borders.
The ongoing tragedies are minimally reported on the Left, unaccompanied minors found in massive numbers in trucks, who knows where many of them end up, and yet, even caring about them a little bit means you must be a member of Q’ANON!
Here is Tim Ballard talking about the movie and mentioning the film’s unsung hero, Glenn Beck, who helped raise the money to save the kids from trafficking, though you can imagine the caterwauling if Beck had been included. It was bad enough as it was.
Sound of Freedom does what almost no films do anymore: tells a great story. Hollywood doesn’t seem able to do that anymore, perhaps you have noticed.
They’ve become obsessed with identity politics, which replaces depth and meaning with dogma - pushing a female character into the Indy franchise and casting “nonbinary” characters in traditional leads and expecting the audience not to notice. It isn’t about authentic characters whose stories matter to audiences — it’s about telling people what and how to think. And it’s everywhere.
If you want to tell a story about a nonbinary character, do that. People who want to watch it will watch it. But big Hollywood films, or certainly blockbusters, should try to reach the widest audience possible, which means writing universal stories for the majority. It’s not hard: Stay true to the characters, then audiences will know them and be invested in their outcome.
Sound of Freedom does this exceptionally well, right from the start. A caring father in a poor country drops his children off at what appears to be a modeling agency. He shows up later to pick them up, and they’ve been kidnapped and sent off to a sex trafficking ring. From that minute on, we can’t look away. We have to watch until the very end. Will Tim Ballard rescue them? Will the father be reunited with them?
Great writing makes things as hard on the protagonist as possible. The barriers put in their way must be believable, so we’re on the edge of our seats the whole time. This allows us to forget our problems in the real world and escape into a story about other people. This has enormous value for all of us, no matter our background.
We are rooting for our heroes until the very last second as they risk their lives to rescue the two kids everyone is worried about and invested in. THAT, my friends, is great storytelling.
Here, we have it all. Tight, lean directing. Spare, powerful dialogue. Flawless pacing — a slow burn — that takes us to the end, where we have the chance to celebrate and applaud the efforts of Ballard.
Jim Caviezel is exceptional in the lead. Not many actors can hold an entire audience with a solid gaze, but Caviezel can; even while saying and doing absolutely nothing, we can’t look away from just his eyes alone, full of pain and a long slow boil of outrage.
This movie’s key line, “God’s children are not for sale,” might have meant that “journalists” in the film coverage industry call it “faith-based,” but it’s a message that will resonate in the right places with the right people. Besides, now that they’ve been overtaken by a secular religion, which they’ve injected in nearly every film they make, they have no room to talk.
One thing some people might not have noticed. The film’s co-writer and director, Alejandro Monteverde inserted a signature shot of the young girl at the film’s center. This image echoed the CBS news report on Ballard, back when the media still gave a damn and weren’t mindless drones for the state.
Here is the still from the report:
And the still from the film:
That’s some heartstopping filmmaking by a very talented director and writer who knows how to tell a great story with not just crisp, original dialogue but indelible imagery.
Now that the writers are striking, they should take this moment to reflect on why it is AI has become such a threat. AI can do what they’ve all been forced to do. It can ensure the story complies strictly with their New Woke Order. It can send the right message. It can be aspirational. But it can’t do what human beings can do. It can’t come up with an original idea. Perhaps in their contract negotiations, they can ask for their freedom back.
The sound of freedom in this film is the sound of children singing and playing music. The sound of freedom in Hollywood is the freedom to tell the truth about people, the human condition, and the darkness of our natures. But why shouldn't AI consume us if we can no longer do that?
Humans need good storytelling, whether it’s gathering around a campfire, a parent reading a bedtime story to a child at night, or even gossiping at the water cooler. It tells us who we are, brings us together, and shapes our belief systems. Who are the heroes? The people who fight sex traffickers. Who are the villains? The people who enable it. It’s not that complicated.
The only way Hollywood can save itself is to tell better stories. Sound of Freedom does that effortlessly and is one of the year’s best films.
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