Boy, that was a good movie, the Sound of Freedom. I intended to see it on the 4th of July when Angel Studios released it, a bold move considering they were putting a critical box office movie in the middle of summer between the new Indiana Jones film and the latest Mission Impossible project. I like these Angel Studios guys; I’ve worked with independent studios in the past, namely the Atlas group for the Atlas Shrugged films, so I have an appreciation for how difficult it is to make a movie in the first place, especially one with a big message like the Sound of Freedom has. But that’s only half the battle. Getting a movie distributed through the theaters is the biggest hurdle, and it’s been in that way that finance has been able to take over the movie industry. Putting this movie out on the 4th of July was hard because it competed with other big studio films with big marketing budgets. I think we should see this kind of thing more often because people hunger for good movies. And it’s usually not an either-or kind of decision. There’s room for Indiana Jones. And there is room for Sound of Freedom. I honestly didn’t expect much from the Sound of Freedom. I thought the movie would have a good message and was important to support. So when I tried to buy tickets for the film on July 3rd and 4th when my wife and I had some free time to see it, I wasn’t too disappointed that I couldn’t find any theaters that weren’t sold out in my area, or if they did have open seats, that we couldn’t find two together. We weren’t going to go to the movies and not sit together; that was ridiculous. So I waited until the following weekend, and we had the same problem. But we did manage to find two open seats for a Saturday afternoon in the third row, which I usually wouldn’t do because it’s too close to the screen. But we bought the tickets, went to see the movie, and were both blown away by what we saw.
The Sound of Freedom was actually, technically, a great film. It reminded me of Schindler’s List, one of my all-time favorite films. But pacing-wise, it reminded me of the Clint Eastwood-directed American Sniper. The Sound of Freedom was of excellent quality, on the level of those kinds of movies, and at a different time, this would undoubtedly be the Best Picture of the Year for the Academy Awards. The director, Alejandro Monteverde, put a lot of love into this film, and it sure showed. It was more of an action-adventure picture, more like Taken, rather than a documentary on child sex trafficking. To be honest, after seeing lots of clips from Jim Caviezel, I thought this film would be more of an activist movie. It certainly was; this film was made by really good people for good reasons, from top to bottom. But it was a far better movie than what usually comes out of those intentions. The director Alejandro Monteverde made a great movie with Jim Caviezel and the cast based on the real-life exploits of the Homeland Security agent Tim Ballard without knowing how the movie would get to the public. The movie has been done for five years; it was first going to be distributed by Fox, then Disney owned the rights, and they sat on it for a long time. Eventually, this new studio, Angel Studios, came along and picked up the rights. They are the studio behind the very well-done television show, The Chosen. So they picked it up and brought it to movie theaters.
Since most of the film production was Mexican, it brought the life of the cartels into sharp focus in ways that I hadn’t seen before. It was a very gritty movie that put viewers into the world of sex trafficking without being oppressively difficult to deal with. The Sound of Freedom walked that very fine line between being tasteful and hopeful, with Jim Caviezel playing the real-life Tim Ballard with such optimism that it wasn’t hard to fall in love with these people. I say all the time about movies, one of the biggest problems is that the writers of these things often don’t have much life experience. You can see that in big studio pictures where the writers clearly hang out in Santa Monica, and their perspective is from that world. The Sound of Freedom was written and directed by people who know the world’s dark underbelly but have not become hopelessly lost in it. What ended up on the screen is really something stunningly special. A movie everyone can enjoy that is much more optimistic than I thought it would have been. And not to give away spoilers, but I think it’s important to note because I honestly wasn’t fighting too hard to see this movie because they are usually depressing. While you want to know about these problematic subject matters, who wants to experience a depressing story? But I can say this movie has a very happy ending. I will likely see it many more times because it really was inspirational, hopeful, and bold.
At the end of the movie, Jim Caviezal came on and gave a little speech, which was very appropriate, during the credits. They also put up a QR code which I took a picture of for this blog site. They encouraged people in the audience to buy tickets for people who couldn’t afford to go to the movie with a Pay it Forward campaign, which I thought was pretty clever and smart marketing on behalf of Angel Studios. There is a lot to like about this entire enterprise that will undoubtedly give hope to anybody who goes and sees it. For those who feel pretty hopeless about the world’s condition, I would strongly recommend The Sound of Freedom as soon as you can get to a theater and see it. I would recommend buying tickets and sending them to someone who might be on the fence. Not only for the box office need for a film like this, because this is how these kinds of movies get made. If they do well at the box office, it impacts the rest of the industry, which is precisely what is needed now with the amount of genuinely sinister aspects of culture that are on our nightly news. This movie is a ray of hope and deserves all the credit that can be given to it. I would personally like to see a lot more out of Angel Studios because this project is a real treasure. And the world could use a lot more from them. But it takes money to tell these kinds of stories, and this is a movie that was done on a high level as a kind of leap of faith. And we are lucky to have it. The world is better because of it. And maybe people will become educated enough from this movie to do something about sex trafficking and the amount of it that is destroying the lives of the innocent before they ever have a chance to live life for themselves.
Rich Hoffman