Performance-wise, he’s stuck on a note of world-historical grief, either crying or staring with bloodshot eyes as he attempts to convey the scale and weight of the tragedy before him. Then you have Caviezel, bleached blond to match Ballard’s buff, clean-cut Mormon profile. Tim Ballard, Inspiration Behind 'Sound of Freedom,' Quietly Leaves Anti-Trafficking Group embellishes and misrepresents their international “missions,” according to a Vice News investigation of the group. The same muddled approach is taken to Ballard’s later, more sensational busts, which is certainly in keeping with the way O.U.R. When the guy fulfills his end of the bargain, Ballard has a dozen police officers swarm the diner they’re in to… arrest him again? Wait, how was he sprung from custody in the first place? Doesn’t matter as long as the drooling creep with requisite glasses and pervert mustache gets his head slammed against a table once more. Lucky! Earlier, Ballard convinces an imprisoned child porn peddler facing a sentence of 30 years to help him contact traffickers in exchange for an immunity deal, needlessly posing as a pedophile himself to gain trust. That original rescue is only possible because Ballard is standing at the exact right spot of a U.S.-Mexico border station at the very moment his target tries to cross. It’s straight-up QAnon stuff, right down to his use of catchphrases like “ The storm is upon us.” Here, he gets to act out some of that drama by playing a fictionalized version of Tim Ballard, head of the anti-sex trafficking nonprofit Operation Underground Railroad (O.U.R.), in a feature film that casts the operator as a Batman-style savior for kids sold into the sex trade.Īpart from its relentless messaging, the movie is hobbled by a near-total absence of procedural logic. But this crowd, I could tell, would view the events depicted over the next two-plus hours as entirely literal.Ĭaviezel, best known for being tortured to death in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, has become a prominent figure on the conspiracist right, giving speeches and interviews in which he hints at an underground holy war between patriots and a sinister legion of evildoers who are harvesting the blood of children. For the seasoned moviegoer, this phrase is a joke - we know that cinema will stretch almost any “truth” to the breaking point - and the rank insincerity of such a pronouncement is the foundation of the prankish opening titles of Fargo. The familiar words had appeared on screen, and an elderly man had taken it upon himself to read them aloud, to the rest of a sizable audience seated for a matinee showing of the anti- child-trafficking thriller Sound of Freedom, starring Jim Caviezel. “Based on a true story,” I heard from somewhere across the theater.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |