The buzz for “Sound of Freedom,” continues to roll out since its eye-opening success at the box office on July 4th, where it quickly dethroned the latest “Indiana Jones” on its opening day.
A hugely polarizing film, “Freedom” is functioning as a sort of morality thermometer, taking America’s temperature. It’s also a wake-up call, and it’s the elephant in the room, finally getting talked about. Child sex trafficking and child pornography are overrunning the planet.
At the bottom of it all is rampant pornography addiction in general. More on this later.
The Story
“Sound of Freedom,” from faith-based production company Angel Studios, tells the story of the real-life agent Tim Ballard (played by Jim Caviezel), formerly with the Department of Homeland Security, who’s dedicated his life to rescuing children from child sex traffickers and sex slavery. He created Operation Underground Railroad in 2013, based on the name of former plantation slave Harriet Tubman’s original slave-emancipation mission.The movie immerses us in this nightmare immediately. After having been recruited and schmoozed by a local talent agent (Yessica Borroto Perryman) to audition for possible modeling gigs via a photo-shoot, Roberto (José Zúñiga) drops off his beautiful 11-year-old daughter Rocio (Cristal Aparicio) and her cute-as-a-button little brother Miguel (Lucás Ávila) in a Honduras hotel room set up to look like a professional photography studio.
Dad is teasingly informed that no stage dads are allowed, and so he relinquishes control and goes for a cup of coffee. Of course, upon returning to the room—everyone’s vanished. His children have been sucked down the drain of the world’s most terrifying human nightmare, and he’s powerless.
Rewriting His Job Description
Back in the United States, Ballard apprehends a pedophile trolling the Internet for new, under-aged meat. Ballard’s an expert in the field, having taken down 300 pedo-criminals.However, what ultimately sticks in his craw is the fact that while he successfully catches predators, and there’s satisfaction in that, it’s an insurmountable task. Child sex-trafficking is a worldwide, $150 billion a year industry, whose filthy operations reach from the lowest, valley-of-death slums, to the rarified oxygen at the highest peaks of society—the world is inundated with it. And it’s too sickening for most to even talk about. As one character says, it’s “too ugly for polite conversation.”
And so Ballard musters up a seldom-seen level of courage, and walks straight into the jaws of death—the proverbial places where “angels fear to tread,” and redefines his job description. He will now save the prey. There’s only one thing to say about this—God bless him.
His new mission leads Ballard to South America, where a man who, a few years earlier, realized too late that the sex he paid for was with a 14-year-old and who is seeking redemption (Bill Camp), helps him put together a complicated sting operation.
This, in turn, eventually leads him into the deepest recesses of rebel-controlled Colombian triple-canopy jungle, where he, working undercover as a doctor with the contrived mission to vaccinate tribal communities against the latest wave of diseases, tracks down the missing child he’s vowed to reunite with her family.
Ballard
Tim Ballard personally requested Jim Caviezel to play him in the film. Caviezel, best known for playing the lead in Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” is the go-to actor these days for portrayals of righteous men, and whose life-mission—the use of his high-profile platform as a beacon of hope and healing—blazes.Caviezel nails the haunted portrayal of a man whose job it is to continuously view material that would give the average person an instantaneous and virulent case of PTSD. And who must summon the fortitude to remain nevertheless un-calloused, vulnerable, and compassionate in order to continue rescuing society’s most vulnerable and innocent from tortured lives of abuse and exploitation by raw greed. A truly heroic task.
“Sound of Freedom,” even with a PG-13 rating, can be a tough watch. Children are shown being abducted, transported in shipping containers, and then sold to perverts. Due to being a faith-based film, SOF does not depict exploitative assault and abuse. Even make-believe, in terms of this subject matter, is too disturbing.
Looking Forward
I hope “Sound of Freedom” opens the door to more such movies, and “spreads the word.” For example, I’d like to see a movie about The Human Exploitation Rescue Operative, or HERO, Child-Rescue Corps.“The HERO Child-Rescue Corps Program is designed for wounded, injured and ill transitioning service members and veterans who receive training in high-tech computer forensics and law enforcement skills to assist federal agents in the fight against online child sexual exploitation.”
Spreading the Word
While writing this review, I was “coincidentally” sent a Instagram video of Candace Owens’s interview. Twenty minutes in, Tim Ballard’s name came up. Owens interviewed Ballard, and what stood out above all else, is that the United States is the number-one consumer of child-pornography—which is also stated in almost every video with Caviezel and Ballard that promotes the movie.Why? As mentioned at the outset, it all boils down to pornography addiction. It’s deadly, and like any addiction, wreaks havoc and intensifies, demanding increasingly depraved situations to obtain the addict-fix. This is single-handedly what’s contributing to the worldwide (but mostly American) male’s moral down-slide into child pornography and child trafficking. The Mexican cartels smirk at America’s sanctimonious finger-pointing about the amount of drugs coming over our border. It’s supply and demand, they counter. They’re not wrong.
This is the word that needs spreading: We men need to stop pointing the finger outward and do our inner work—shut down the pornographers by shutting down porn addiction. Definitely boycott Bud Light but also, and more stringently, boycott all forms of pornography. Then the child traffickers will be forced out of business.
