"When you receive God's call, you can't doubt" - Bill Camp, as "Vampire", in Sound of Freedom.
The great cinephile surprise of the year, Sound of Freedom, finally reached almost all of Latin America, confirming what has been reviewed about it in the critics: it is one of the most emotional films of 2023.
It also confirms something no less important: the few critics who attack it from various liberal media – such as The Washington Post, Rolling Stone magazine, The Guardian and Jezebel– have a deep political bias and an intrinsic phobia of Christianity.
Sound of Freedom is a great movie
The production of Eduardo Verástegui, far from filling us with ultra-right propaganda or conspiracy theories as some media tell us, delves into the deep world of child trafficking to show, in a crude way, how this criminal industry that produces trillions of dollars annual while enslaving and destroying families around the world.
It is a film that, in addition, is very well achieved. It transmits emotion, keeps you captive, empathizes with the real stories of the characters and ends up becoming aware of a real problem, very present in society, that deserves massive visibility, something that Sound of Freedom achieved with a fantastic marketing work.
There are many highlights of Sound of Freedom. Among them, the soundtrack or the great performance of Bill Camp, "Vampiro", who left us the best scene of the film when he explains to agent Tim Ballard (Jim Caviezel) how he left the drug business after trying to commit suicide to dedicate himself to rescuing children under the shadows: "When you receive God's call, you cannot doubt".
Nor can we forget the splendid work of Mexican Alejandro Gómez Monteverde, who turned a $10,000,000 film into a high-quality production that is on track to reach $200,000,000. An absolute hit of independent cinema that is making history.
But woke critics loathe it
However, Sound of Freedom is not being acclaimed by everyone.
Certainly, there are details, some not minor, that can be criticized to the film. For example, the script does not stand out; And some Hispanic characters have a rather overacted and deficient Spanish, a casting error that lowers some points to the production.
But the woke critique, which weans Sound of Freedom, does not focus on the level of production, script, photography, soundtrack or performance of the actors. On the contrary, he insists on oversizing or looking for a dubious relationship between theories – such as QAnon – and a film that was directed in 2018, long before those same theories became popular on the Internet.
Critics who, from an elitist bubble in a Starbucks in New York, lecture the audience about cinema explaining truisms such as that a production "based on real events" does not mean that it is completely real.
In fact, the audience doesn't need any critics to tell them that Sound of Freedom isn't completely grounded in reality, as Ballard's own non-profit Operation Underground Railroad explains that many details didn't really happen as depicted in the film. Something that is very common in this type of productions or even in war cinema.
However, one thing is undoubtedly certain: Ballard is no fictional character, in fact, he has carried out many operations where dozens of children and people enslaved in the white slave trade industry have been saved.
Perhaps he is not a Marvel superhero and in fact did not have to kill a guerrilla with his own hands according to his own organization, but there is no doubt that he is a brave man who has saved hundreds of people from sexual slavery and collaborated with the criminal imprisonment by dismantling terrible organizations. If that's not a hero, then I don't know what is.
But critics aren't really bothered that Sound of Freedom has a bit of fiction in its story. They are bothered by something else: its powerful message based on faith and Christian values.
It's annoying that the characters, real, were motivated by God's call. That they risked everything—their jobs, families, and lives— because they were working for something far greater than themselves.
At heart, the woke critics of the Washington Post or Rolling Stone are not only politically ideologized, but they are deeply anti-Christian and therefore do not understand the sense of transcendence that is unstoppably driving Sound of Freedom throughout our hemisphere.
