"Sound of Freedom," A Review

A low-budget movie originally produced by Fox and sat on by Disney over five years finally gets its due. Powerful, but not too powerful for quesy viewers. It's mostly truthful, and important.

Jul 28, 2023

While media critics have lined up to criticize or discredit the new “Sound of Freedom” movie, starring Jim Caviezel (“Passion of the Christ,” “Infidel,” etc.) and based on the mostly true story of Tim Ballard, Americans are voicing their approval with their ticket sales and attendance.

Critics accuse Caviezel and others associated with the movie of spreading conspiracy theories while hypocritically engaging in them. Others, who I doubt have seen the movie, are attacking it primarily based on Caviezel’s participation, claiming right-wing political motivations (Caviezel’s last starring role was in the movie, Infidel, which conservative author and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza produced) and even blather that the movie is “QAnon Adjacent,” most notably by one hostile Manhattan-based reviewer writing for the far-left Guardian.

Caviezel has saved that for his promotional media appearances, such as a recent drop-in to Steve Bannon’s show War Room on MyPillow proprietor Mike Lindell’s streaming channel Lindell TV. In the course of their interview, he conveyed the severity of the situation by explaining that an enterprising salesperson would have to move 1,000 barrels of oil to match the sum they’d get for filling one barrel with the rendered corpses of the innocent. Elsewhere, he’s parroted falsehoods about Pizzagate and other underground cells subsisting on human blood, all of it pointing back to a foundation of conspiratorial thought targeting the Jewish and transgender communities. (The last two links were added)

How dare Caviezel appear on conservative media to promote the movie and expose child sex trafficking! Caviezel claims no connection to QAnon, and neither conspiracy theory is remotely referenced in Sound of Freedom. However, he appeared at a screening hosted by former President Donald Trump and said nice things in a Fox News interview about Trump’s interest in stopping child trafficking. L'horreur! Ballard has also been critical of Biden Administration border policies.

My wife and I finally saw the movie Wednesday afternoon. No, the west-end Alexandria, Virginia, theater wasn’t crowded. It was, after all, mid-afternoon on a workday when most movie tickets were discounted. Then again, the movie was released 22 days previously.

AMC, the 100-year-old movie chain, says more than a million people have flocked to see the film. “More than ONE MILLION people have watched Sound of Freedom at AMC Theatres. More than at any other theatre chain on the planet. Yet people falsely claim otherwise. It is so bizarre,” CEO Adam Aron said on Twitter on July 12. Over 11 million tickets have been purchased through an app, Pay It Forward (not to be confused with the movie by that name).

Some movie supporters claim that AMC used nefarious tactics to censor the film and discourage moviegoers. I see no evidence of that and it makes no sense. Sound of Freedom’s producers have high praise for AMC.

The movie is based on the real-life exploits of former federal agent (Homeland Security) Timothy Ballard. Much, but not all, actually happened. A federal agent as the protagonist! The Left should be thrilled. Then again, he’s an ICE (Immigration Control and Enforcement) agent. Oops.

Here’s a quick synopsis.

Ballard founded and once ran Operation Underground Railroad and was part of a Child Sex Tourism “Jump Team” for the Department of Homeland Security when his team nails someone in Calexico, California, downloading child trafficking info. Ballard “befriends” the pervert and busts him when he provides evidence of actual child sex trafficking, with a brother and older sister duo as the focus.

How traffickers ensnared these two young children is fascinating. The single father of the kids was lied to by a former beauty queen, Giselle (in real life, her name is Kelly Johana Suarez), for the kids to audition for a broadcast program. The father is not allowed into the room where his kids and several others are photographed and then parroted away to be placed in a container ship for a harrowing and frightful trip to Columbia. The father shows up at his appointed hour to retrieve his children, only to find the place abandoned.

To make a long story short, Ballard, played by Caviezel, persuades his boss to let him go to Colombia to find the trafficked boy but is pressured to return and give up his quest after a week. The boss says it’s not their responsibility to find trafficked Honduran children in Colombia. With his wife's support (played by Mira Sorvino), Ballard quits his job just months before he qualifies for a “full pension” and begins working independently with the help of a local operator, the hard-drinking and cigar-smoking “Vampiro,” who shares his passion for rescuing kids.

There is one fantastic scene where Ballard works with Columbian officials on a “sting” operation on an island (I was quickly reminded of Jeffery Epstein’s Island) that was supposedly a swanky resort for perverts to hook up with trafficked kids, supplied by Suarez. That scene was accurate and suspenseful.

Another scene shows Ballard, portraying a United Nations doctor, entering the rebel-controlled part of the Colombian jungle to find and rescue the young boy’s sister. That sequence of scenes was the movie’s climactic moment but did not happen in real life, even as the sister was eventually found, and Ballard did lead an operation near the border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

It was also made five years ago by Fox Studios but not released after Disney bought them. Disney sat on the movie, and the original producers finally bought the rights. They’re not blaming Disney, but it does raise a question (more conspiracy theories!) about why they sat on it. The pandemic would have been the wrong time to release the movie, anyway, and the producers are happy with the timing. So there’s that. But Disney has never really explained why they did nothing with it. From the website readysteadycut.com:

It might surprise you to learn that Sound of Freedom is not a new movie. The film was made in 2018 and was never released. Reports indicate that the producers of the film had struck a deal with 20th Century Fox to handle the movie release. Events at the time led the film to be shelved after Fox was absorbed by Disney, who were on a spending spree at the time to acquire as many companies as they could.
However, the waters get muddy here, as there has still been no confirmation from The House of Mouse as to why they never attempted to get the film released.
The event of COVID-19 also added to the problems the film had in getting shown.
The film’s director, Alejandro Monteverde, would eventually be able to strike a deal with Angel Studios in a final push to get the film distributed.
It required a Crowdfunding campaign to raise the funds, but the fund was successful, and the game was afoot.
A statement from a Disney spokesperson in regard to the film would say that “(Disney) studios had no knowledge of the film given the nature of the international acquisition pre-merger.”

I find the Disney statement not believable and raises more questions about the “happiest place on earth.” Companies do enormous due diligence before acquisitions and mergers, including a thorough inventory of assets. They should be more forthcoming.

I am sure not taking my grandchildren to Orlando or Orange County, California, to “feed the mouse.”

The most bizarre, even alarming aspect of the reaction or lead-up to Sound of Freedom is the claim that child sex trafficking isn’t a real issue or little more than a right-wing conspiracy theory. “The Great (Fake) Child Sex Trafficking Epidemic” blares the headline from this post in The Atlantic from early 2022.

A thought comes to mind. If there were evidence that conservatives, Republicans, evangelical Christians, or “white supremacists” were major child sex traffickers, The “progressive left” would be all over it. Which makes you ask, why aren’t they? Who are they protecting?

Maybe people like former ABC-TV reporter James Gordon Meek. To be clear, perversion knows no party.

Too bad they didn’t wait until this Spring when US Department of Health and Human Services whistleblower Tara Lee Rodas testified before a House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration.

Today, children will work overnight shifts at slaughterhouses, factories, restaurants to pay their debts to smugglers and traffickers. Today, children will be sold for sex.
Today, children will call a hotline to report the are being abused, neglected, and trafficked. For nearly a decade, unaccompanied children have been suffering in the shadows. I must confess; I knew nothing about their suffering until 2021 when I volunteered to help the Biden administration with the crisis at the Southern Border. As part of Operation Artemis, I was deployed to the Pomona Fairplex Emergency Intake Site in California to help the HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement reunite children with sponsors in the US.
I thought I was going to help place children in loving homes. Instead, I discovered that children are trafficked through a sophisticated network that begins with being recruited in their home country, smuggled to the US border, and ends when ORR delivers a child to a Sponsor – some sponsors are criminals and traffickers and members of Transnational Criminal Organizations. Some sponsors view children as commodities and assets to be used for earning income - this is why we are witnessing an explosion of labor trafficking. (emphasis added)
Whether intentional or not, it can be argued that the US Government has become the middleman in a large-scale, multi-billion-dollar child trafficking operation run by bad actors seeking to profit off the lives of children.

Too bad The Atlantic’s authors and others who criticize the movie for exaggerating “conspiracy theories” weren’t aware of the FBI’s Operation Cross Country, which in 2022 rescued 84 children in a sex trafficking ring. And on June 7th, the Wall Street Journal detailed how Meta’s Instagram connects a vast pedophile network.

While the movie is focused on child sex trafficking, the issue of human trafficking is huge. The United Nations says that annually, some 2.4 million men, women, and children are trafficked into forced labor, including sex. Economist and author Dr. Thomas Sowell suggests the number of enslaved people around the globe is closer to 25 million.

And the United States is a big part of the problem. Not just the demand side of the equation, much like our illicit drug issue, but even our federal government. While Caviezel mentions that in a special message after the movie’s credits (stay for that), the movie does not include examples of how children are exploited for these purposes in the United States - the movie’s primary landscape is Colombia and Central America.

Also, the Biden administration’s failed and malevolent immigration policies exacerbate the problem. For example, they’ve discontinued the Trump Administration policy of conducting familial DNA testing on immigrant children traveling with adults to ensure they belong to each other. Why is that? Maybe we should ask Tara Lee Rodas. The Biden Administration can’t account for 85,000 children of more than 300,000 who’ve crossed the border since early 2021. Little attention is being paid to the activities of the non-profit organizations that these children are often farmed off to.

Also, in reality, trafficked kids often know their trafficker. At least in the U.S.

The movie is not political or conspiratorial, and any attempt to cast it as such is laughable and transparently partisan. It sometimes suffers due to its low-budget production values (the conversations were often hard to decipher) and the stoic Caviezel’s sometimes less-than-persuasive scenes when he’s playing an undercover cop. Despite these shortcomings, the issue is real, making Sound of Freedom a must-see. We cannot allow those who wish us to ignore or minimize this issue to succeed or distract us. I’m grateful it’s now going international, especially in Latin America.

One last thing: Hollywood will ensure this movie receives no Oscar or other nomination or award. Take that to the bank. And ask yourselves, why?

Go see the movie, and take people with you. Four stars.

Against the Grain

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