This film certainly made a lot of waves when it was coming out. It deals with the rather heavy themes of human trafficking and goes very in depth with the subject. So this isn’t meant to be a fun watch by any means but more of an instructional one. Always keep your guard up and be careful out there. You need to be careful not to let your kids out of your sight with any strangers and even with people you know unless you are 100% confident that everything will be okay. Villains lie around every corner.

The film follows a guy named Tim who works for Homeland Security and his main job is really about finding podophiles across the country. Sometimes he is able to save some of the victims as well but typically they are taken across the border so there isn’t much more that the country can officially do about it. One day he plays the long game with one of the villains to get his trust and manages to actually save some of the victims. One of these victims explains that his sister is still being held captive and so Tim decides that this time he is going to see the mission all the way through. He will have to go to Columbia and so he loses the support of the homeland since this is out of his jurisdiction. Tim’s officially gone rogue and will have to use all of his skills to take these guys down.

There isn’t a lot of action for most of the film as it’s really about Tim having to set up a trap for these guys. He plays nice with the locals and has to act the part for a while. The idea is to build a giant building filled with kids to get all of the villains around and of course one of those kids might be the girl that he’s looking for. Of course it’s a very risky endeavor as well because if he gets taken out of the picture, now there is a new base for the villains. Also he has to wait until all of the kids land and so the first ones who get into the island are in the most amount of danger.

I’d say the main weakness that the film runs into is that since Chris has to pretend to be evil for most of the film, it feels like the majority of the film is just villains chatting with each other and talking about evil subjects. The dialogue is just hard to listen to even when nothing is happening. Then the film is fairly graphic in detail about what’s going on here and the main character barely manages to get there in time. One character’s origin is another tragic one about being with a minor when he didn’t even realize it.

Basically, this film is unrelentingly dark at all times. There’s never really any time for happy scenes here. Sure there may be a smile once in a while but only the very ending is actually happy. That’s a long time that you have to sit through to get to that point. For any film the objective for me as a viewer is to have fun. If you’re not having fun then the entertainment part of the genre is being lost and that’s always a problem. I would have preferred if the film has just dramatized things a bit and been more of an action thriller where he went around shooting everyone and saving the day. Of course you can only take so many liberties when being based off of a real event.

The takeaway here is to do your part in trying to make the world a better place. Be careful which organizations you donate to since tons of them are scams and just redirecting the money but find one that is actually helping and contribute. It can feel a bit futile at times with how much corruption there is in the world but we’ll be stuck here a while longer and every single person you can help is one less person being hurt or becoming a victim. Even if the film itself may be a little too daunting to check out, you can always do research online on ways to help.

Overall, Sound of Freedom is definitely an intense film. I do think that it goes too far to illustrate the points of the dark fates that go to anyone who has been trafficked. We understand implicitly what happens at that point without needing to see the whole leadup to it and aftermath. In a standard film that I’d review, going this far in depth would net you the immediate 0. This film is based on a true story so there’s no score and these kinds of films tend to have much more content since you can get away with more in that context. It’s why you can have documentaries and such with enough content to be an easy R just get a standard PG since it’s in a scientific context. As long as this film can inspire more people to support the cause of keeping everyone safe then that’s a good thing.