When dealing with a movie as powerful as Sound of Freedom (2022), one does not make the typical jokes as I attempt at the outset of these reviews.  At its best, cinema should make you feel something.  Some films attempt to scare you, others to make you laugh, while still others go for thrills.  You can fill in for yourself which genres to which I am referring in the previous sentence.  Sometimes these can speak to your heart, the place where God should reside in all of us, though I have yet to experience this in a horror flick.  So, why was I moved to tears in watching this drama piece?  Because it involves a crime against humanity that most would rather believe had been resolved hundreds of years ago: human trafficking, or, put more plainly, slavery.  This is not a euphemism for some other practice, or people being paid low wages for manual labor, but actual human beings held against their wills and forced to do all manner of unspeakable things.  Since I started writing this article, I did a little research on the true story behind the events depicted in the movie.  There seems to be some who question its authenticity.  I will discuss later why this matters little.  The one salient point that nobody can disagree on, a fact I learned from taking courses on slavery in graduate school and was reminded about at the end, is that there are more individuals in bondage than at any point in history.

Unfortunately, Sound of Freedom brings to the attention of us Americans just how close these barbaric practices are to our own borders.  In Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, lives Roberto Alvarez (José Zuñiga) with his young daughter, and even younger son.  One day he gets a knock on the door from Katy-Giselle (Yessica Borroto Perryman), who claims to have heard his daughter sing and, as a talent agent, says that the little girl can be a star.  Seeing that Roberto has a son as well, Katy-Giselle wants to make him famous, too.  Roberto takes them to their photo shoot, but is told that he cannot be on set with them.  He can some back later to pick up his children.  Unsurprisingly, they are gone when he returns.  The movie then switches to Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Agent Tim Ballard (Jim Caviezel), but I am going to stick with the kids for a moment.  At one point, Robert’s children are separated after being taken to Cartagena, Columbia.  The daughter is kept there to be turned into a prostitute, while the son is taken by a rich American as a child sex slave.  Tim becomes acquainted with their plight after his agency conducts a raid on a pedophile suspected of downloading images on the border of California.  After they make their arrest, Tim’s partner says that he cannot do this job anymore.  Part of it involves reviewing the material they have confiscated, and it has an emotional impact on Tim.  Thus, he decides to get his recent collar to reveal a little more about how the underground network of human traffickers works.  Gaining the trust of the perpetrator, Tim has arrangements made to purchase a child from Latin America.  It turns out to be Roberto’s son.  Following the rescue, the kid reveals that he has a sister, and that the last place he saw her was in Columbia.  Tim wants to help, but as a Federal agent, Columbia is outside his jurisdiction.  Seeing the pain in Roberto for still not having his daughter spurs Tim to act.  He manages to convince his immediate supervisor, Frost (Kurt Fuller), to send him to Cartagena under the pretext of training local law enforcement.  Once Tim arrives in South America, he is introduced to two key people.  The first is a Columbian cop named Jorge (Javier Godino), who will become an important asset in Tim’s activities.  Of even greater assistance is a man referred to as Vampiro (Bill Camp).  He is a former highly placed member of the drug cartel, who also served time in prison, but now spends his ill-gotten gains in purchasing children and freeing them.  Between Jorge and Vampiro, they teach Tim how the underground system works in Cartagena.  They also know about Katy-Giselle, whom Roberto’s son identifies.  Tim wants to go after her right away, but is warned against it by Vampiro.  Another potential roadblock is when Frost decides that Tim has overstayed his time in Columbia and orders the HSI agent home.  Instead, Tim quits in order to continue his search for Roberto’s daughter.  He thus turns to billionaire financier Paul (Eduardo Verástegui) to fund his activities.  Tim’s idea is to set up a resort on an island near Cartagena to attract not only the criminals seeking to purchase children, but to rescue a number of children at once, namely Roberto’s daughter.  Everything goes as planned, but she is not among the over fifty kids brought to the resort.  Instead, she had been sold to El Alcarán (Gerardo Taracena), a rebel leader deep in the jungles of Columbia.  Determined not to give up, Tim and Vampiro disguise themselves as United Nations (UN) doctors going into rural areas in order to inoculate people in these disadvantaged regions.  When they get to rebel territory, Tim is forced to go on by himself.  It is not long after to getting to El Alcarán’s village that Tim finds Roberto’s daughter.  Unfortunately, she is El Alcarán’s personal property.  This means that when Tim attempts to sneak her away from the camp, he ends up having to kill the rebel leader.  Luckily, he manages to make his way down the river and back to Jorge and Vampiro waiting for him in a car.  The rebels are following closely, but they are able to escape.  Roberto flies to Cartagena to reunite with his daughter, and the final shot is of her back in her own room banging out a song of freedom on her drum.

People should focus on the poetic beginning and ending of Sound of Freedom.  Instead, there are those out there that want to criticize the film for its inaccuracies.  As a historian, I must confess to being guilty of doing this with movies that deal with the past.  This one fits that description.  What arguably needs to happen is a more objective understanding of what the term “based on a true story” means.  When people see this at the beginning of a flick, they automatically assume that what they are seeing actually happened as depicted.  This one makes no claims to that end, but it is slammed for taking liberties as if this never happens in Hollywood.  I have no proof of this, but instinct says that it is because of Jim Caviezel’s involvement.  With no offense to Mark Wahlberg, Caviezel is the real practicing Catholic in the business.  He had been in some big-time productions, in cinema and television, yet since he became more vocal about his Faith, where do you see him?  Another criticism that I saw, related to embellishment, is that the film (and Ballard in real-life) over-states the role that Operation Underground Railroad (OUR) played in the Cartagena mission.  First, not once is OUR mentioned in the proceedings.  Secondly, you can see Ballard in the real-life footage of the raid, pretty close to how you see it in the movie.  What this all does is obfuscate the important issue that you are seeing on screen.  I know nothing about what OUR does.  This is also not the main subject of the film.

Another aspect to what I believe keeps people from seeing a film like Sound of Freedom is that they think, with Caviezel’s involvement, they are going to get hit over the head with a Christian message.  To be sure, Faith is an important part of what happens.  One of Tim’s oft repeated phrases is that God’s children are not for sale.  Amen.  How anyone cannot get behind such a statement is beyond me.  Yet, as powerful of a truth this is, there is one that spoke to me on a more individual level.  At one point, Tim asks Vampiro why he buys the freedom of child slaves.  He goes on to describe getting out of prison in Columbia.  Apparently, their penal system is none too reformatory for he goes right back into the business of selling drugs, and everything that comes with that lifestyle, though he confesses to not feeling the same as before his time in jail.  One feature of this life is soliciting prostitutes.  He pays for sex with a girl he believes to be twenty or twenty-five, but turns out to be fourteen.  So ashamed is he by what he has done that he decides to commit suicide by shooting himself in the head.  In such crucial moments, people tend to turn to God, and Vampiro relates that he is no different.  Before he could go through with it, God gave Vampiro a different path.  He ends this story by reminding Tim that when God tells you what to do, you cannot hesitate.  We do not need to be on the verge of ending our lives in order to hear God’s will for our lives, though one can argue that it is in that second that we are most open to Him.  Either way, the point stands that one should not prevaricate when given a command from God.  You could do just that, but the Bible is full of stories of that course of action (or, more accurately, inaction) not leading to the best of results.  This also does not mean that life will be perfect if you accept His will.  The whole of Christendom has a number of other anecdotes of the comparably uncomfortable situations into which God’s plan can lead us.  This movie is yet another example of this truth.  Yet, God gives us commands not only because He knows what is best for us, but for the whole human race.  Ending human trafficking is among those things.

Ultimately, as Jim Caviezel says while the credits for Sound of Freedom roll, ending the scourge that is slavery is the goal of the film.  You can say whatever you like about the movie, the important matter is what it hopes to accomplish.  To that end, Caviezel compares this film to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), the novel that gave a major boost to the nineteenth century anti-slavery movement in the United States.  No one can argue its importance.  At the same time, nobody quibbles about the fact that it is a novel.  Thus, if any of this has inspired you, I encourage you to donate to angel.com/freedom.  Doing so will help spread the word about this movie, and hopefully begin bringing about the final dismantling of the peculiar institution.