Sound of Freedom Is Hard to Watch. Here’s Why We Need to See It Anyway.

The movie Sound of Freedom was both one of the best and worst movies I’ve ever seen.  Best because the story was interesting, the protagonists were likable and engaging, and the plot moved quickly. But the worst part is that it was also very hard to watch because I went into the theater knowing that the movie is largely true.  

The movie starts off with the kidnapping of a brother and sister from Honduras by a young woman posing as a talent agent.  You then see the American Homeland Security agent, Tim Ballard, recover the little boy.  After the little boy’s rescue, he asks Tim if he can find his sister, too, and most of the movie involves Tim trying to find out what happened to the little girl.  

It’s an action story of a man trying to put a family back together; it’s also a story of Tim Ballard’s personal journey in leaving the security of a government job to do what he believes is right.

Here’s some background.

I watched Jordan Peterson’s interview with both Tim Ballard and Jim Caviezel, who plays Tim in the movie, and I recommend it because it adds a bit of depth to what was going through Tim’s mind.  Tim’s wife is only a very minor character in the movie, but in his interview with Jordan Peterson, Tim tells Jordan that she was actually one of the major drivers behind his actions.  

Tim is a devout Mormon and had six children of his own at the time he was trying to track down the little girl from Honduras.  When it became clear that trying to find her would mean leaving his government job, he tells Jordan he almost wanted his wife to tell him to just come home.  Instead, she asked what he’d do if one of their children was missing, and told him, “I’m not going to allow you to jeopardize my salvation by not doing this.”  Tim’s wife said she was willing to live in a tent if that was what it took for them to live with clean consciences.  

Here are some key takeaways from Sound of Freedom.

This movie provided so much food for thought it’s hard to know where to start. 

The movie, combined with the Jordan Peterson interview, struck me in that it really shows what a strong marriage between two people firm in their beliefs can accomplish in society.  I’ve been divorced for a long time, though, so maybe that’s made me more impressed by the couples who do get it right.  

More than this, the movie shows how easy it is for little children to be dragged around, unnoticed, through seedy harbors and party towns and sometimes into the background of American living.  The little boy is rescued at a checkpoint between the U.S.-Mexican border when it was more secure.  Tim Ballard says in multiple interviews that this is how it actually happened; they had a photo of the little boy and his sex-offending “guardian,” and so were able to throw the offender in jail and reunite the little boy with his dad.

But this event took place ten years ago. Our borders are a sieve now, and things have changed.  

In an interview with Redacted,  Tim Ballard talks about how our border policies under Biden have made the problem of child exploitation so much worse.  Because the border has been so much more open, more people are willing to take risks in heading toward the border.  

Many smugglers work with “sponsors” in the U.S.  They write down a name or phone number and pin it to a child’s shirt.  When they arrive in the U.S., government employees turn the children over to these “sponsors,” who will put the children to all kinds of work.  

Tim Ballard is not the only person making these claims. Tara Lee Rodas, who worked at an intake site in California, came forward and testified to Congress that this was happening.   

We think that we’re being nice by letting everyone into the States, but we aren’t.  There is absolute chaos at our southern border.  And chaos engenders atrocities.  

The thriving business of human trafficking

Human traffickers have been making more than $14 million per day smuggling people through the Mexican-American border. Human trafficking is the fastest-growing international crime trade, generating about $16 trillion per year worldwide.

Some places are trying to tackle this.  A great deal of prostitution-related crime occurs in hotels. In 2019, Florida required hotels to watch out for trafficking schemes, and in 2023, they cut the time for hotels to get into compliance in half before issuing fines. 

Other places just won’t admit it’s a real problem.  California is one of the largest sites for human trafficking in the United States, and yet California Democrats just killed a bill that would make human trafficking a felony.

Human trafficking is big business, and it goes to the top of society.  Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislane Maxwell are probably the most famous, and they were known for hobnobbing with the likes of Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew.  

And maybe that’s why the MSM hates this movie.

Which probably explains why this movie ran into so many problems.  It took five years to be released.  The script was actually written back in 2015, and they finished filming in 2018.  After the movie was filmed, the producers made a distribution deal with 20th Century Fox.  However, in 2019 Disney purchased 20th Century Fox, and they sat on the movie.  In 2023, Angel Studios obtained distribution rights, which is why we can see it in the theaters now. 

Now that it has been released, audiences love it. Sound of Freedom has a 100% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.  It even has a 77% critic score, which is somewhat surprising given all the negative press attention it’s received.  

CNN claimed the movie fed into QAnon conspiracy theories despite the fact that human trafficking is a well-documented problem.  

Oh, wait, CNN fired high-level employees Chris Cuomo, John Griffin, and Rick Saleeby after they were all arrested for crimes involving children.  Maybe it’s not so surprising that the network is trashing a movie that portrays child molesters as the bad guys, after all. 

It makes me wonder what Rolling Stone has to hide. They called Sound of Freedom a “superhero movie for dads with brainworms.” 

 We are at a strange time in American history. 

When I was young, being in a homosexual relationship was scandalous.  You could lose your job over that.  When same-sex marriage was legalized nationwide, most people didn’t have a problem with it. I think a lot of us knew gay people that had some legitimate complaints surrounding health insurance and power of attorney for their partners, and it didn’t seem unreasonable to allow them access to the same kinds of benefits heterosexual couples enjoyed.

The trans movement’s been weirder.  There’s not a specific set of legal privileges they want access to. Instead, they want other people to recognize their ideas about gender identity and play into their fantasies.  The destruction of women’s spaces by letting biological men into women’s bathrooms and women’s sports leagues has turned the issue from ideological to physical.  

And it’s still not stopping.  It hasn’t been enough to destroy sexual norms and women’s sports.  Have you seen the drag marchers chanting, “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children”?   They’re not joking.  People with a wide variety of sexual preferences have always been around, but for a long time, behaviors were limited by cultural and religious norms.  Those have been destroyed.  

As I child, I had limited experience with some people that just assumed, “Well, kids that age don’t really understand anyway.”  There are more perverts out there than most people want to admit.  The majority of the population is not particularly violent or perverted, but they will just look away when confronted with ugly things. 

Sound of Freedom begs people not to look away.

In case you were concerned, there are no scenes whatsoever of violence against children in the movie.  They just do a really good job of having Jim Caviezel look upset at the right times, and the child actors also do a good job of looking scared at the right moments so that you can tell what’s going on without actually seeing it.

At one point in the movie, when Tim Ballard is trying to convince some wealthy individuals to help him, he tells them that child sex trafficking is the highest growing international crime syndicate, already passing up weapons dealing and soon to pass the drug cartels.  He also tells them that, if it is not stopped, the pain of these children will spread until it reaches everything until it touches even the people that think they cannot be touched.

You really should see it, though you might want to buy your tickets early.  I went during the middle of the week, thinking I didn’t need to worry about finding a seat, but the theater was packed.  If you get inspired to take some kind of action or support Tim Ballard’s charity, that’s great.  

If not, it’s still a really good action movie.

Have you seen Sound of Freedom?

Have you seen the movie? What did you think of it? If not, do you plan to do so? Why or why not? Do you have any thoughts on why the MSM is so adamantly opposed to the movie?

Let’s discuss it in the comments section.

About Marie Hawthorne

A lover of novels and cultivator of superb apple pie recipes, Marie spends her free time writing about the world around her.