Before beginning this review, let me state that you must see Sound of Freedom (2023).  It is likely the most important film of the last decade, if not this century, so far.  If you’d like to contribute to help others see it in theaters, Angel Studios has a pay-it-forward program.  If you are financially strapped but want to see it on the big screen—and, trust me, you want to see it on the big screen—Angel Studios allows you to claim free tickets (well, tickets, other folks have paid for).  Lead actor Jim Caviezel compares the film to Harriett Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), which President Lincoln (apocryphally) claimed “started this great war” (the American Civil War) because of the impact it had on the burgeoning anti-slavery movement in the United States.  For what it’s worth, I think Caviezel is correct:  Sound of Freedom is waking people up to the terrifying realities of child sex trafficking.  —TPP

If cinema does one thing well, it is creating an experience for the audience.  We’ve grown used to watching big-budget, CGI-infested foolishness that overloads our senses and shuts down our brains—an experience in and of itself—but the real power of film is to make something beyond our personal experience real for us.  Sound of Freedom (2023) has that effect in bringing to life the real-world tragedy of human trafficking, specifically child sex trafficking.

The film centers on Tim Ballard, an agent with the Department of Homeland Security assigned with arresting pedophiles and child pornographers.  He spends the film attempting to rescue two siblings, Miguel and Rocio Aguilar, who are taken in the opening scenes of the film in a child sex trafficking scam.

Ballard endures hours of footage of child sexual abuse and exploitation, all of which he must document.  He reaches his breaking point after viewing one video, and resolves to free children, rather than catch the perverts who indulge in their images (or, grotesquely and horribly enough, their bodies).

The film unfolds like an action movie.  Ballard befriends an arrested pedophile by pretending to be one himself, which leads to Miguel’s rescue.  Miguel gives Ballard his sister’s Saint Timothy medallion, and begs Ballard to find her.

That sends Ballard to Colombia, first under the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security, then as a solo agent.  Through a series of contacts, including the former cartel accountant Vampiro, Ballard coordinates a successful sting operation that liberates over fifty children, but Rocio is not among them.

I don’t want to reveal too much more of the plot, but suffice it to say that the depictions of child sex trafficking are horrifying.  The film does a great deal of “telling without showing”—there are no scenes of a child being r*ped, thank goodness—and illustrates the horrors of sexual abuse via implication.  However, what the film does show is terrible enough:  kids and parents duped into handing their children over to strangers; kids loaded into storage containers and imprisoned on ships for untold days or weeks; kids sold to wicked, perverted Americans for ungodly reasons; kids sold to brothels for sexual tourists; and on and on.

That is where the power of the film derives:  it shows, quite vividly and unsettlingly, all the things we know are happening, the things we read about everyday, but which become too easy for us to write off or ignore.  Joseph Stalin was an evil man, but even he was right when he (allegedly) said, “One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.”  Seeing Miguel and Rocio’s ordeal—and Ballard’s unceasing drive to free them—makes the realities of child trafficking real for the audience.

Critics in the media have dubbed the film “Q-Anon adjacent” under the guise of “fact-checking,” but really in a thinly-veiled attempt to discredit the film.  It’s the classic category error of the Left:  because some group they find abhorrent likes the film, the film itself is abhorrent.  That would be like saying eating carrots is evil because Hitler was a vegetarian.  Yes, Jim Caviezel is “Q-Anon adjacent” and believes a secretive cabal of global elites are farming and sexually abusing children for their precious adrenochome (for what it’s worth, I believe this theory has credence, too!), but that does discredit the film’s central message.

Nor does the film’s creative license with the story.  Angel Studios published a detailed blog post, which explains where the film took some creative liberties, and the stories behind the film’s real characters.  Every “based on a true story” film takes creative license to one degree or another to make for a more compelling film.  Detractors are arguing that these liberties detract from the Truth at the heart of the film, but I disagree:  if anything, the compelling narrative of the film enhances our appreciation for the problem

One point critics make with which I do agree is that the film only gives part of the story.  Again, critics present this situation as dishonesty on the part of the filmmakers—“they focus too much on child sex trafficking, so it must be fake!” is the implication—when in reality, it’s the necessity of any storytelling medium.  Several of the critical articles I’ve read point out—correctly—that most child trafficking involves a.) slightly older children (mostly teens) and b.) forced labor, not sexual exploitation.  These are, indeed, real problems, and the fact that there is more slavery today than there was in the antebellum South (and nineteenth-century Latin America) is staggering to consider.

That said, child sex trafficking is real.  A film can focus on child sex trafficking—the most horrific form of slavery in existence today—without the fact of child sex trafficking being questioned, merely because the film did not depict all forms of slavery.  Even that critique falls flat, as in one scene, Ballard travels to a rebel camp in Colombia, and the people there are—quite clearly—slaves engaged in forced labor.  I would welcome more films like Sound of Freedom about other aspects of human trafficking and modern slavery, but the minimal exposure of broader forms of these crimes in the film does not negate the Truth of child sex trafficking.

What broke my heart was a statistic at the end of the film pointing to the massive economic impact of the child sex trafficking industry, and how much of the demand comes from America.  I have rarely been ashamed of my country; that statistic made me disgusted with what the United States has allowed itself to become.  We binge feed ourselves on drugs and pornography that are the result of forced labor and sexual exploitation (even adults in pornography are—almost entirely!—victims of childhood sexual abuse; that is especially true of women in pornography, who are often damaged from early sexual, emotional, and physical abuse—not exactly female empowerment).  We are the customers creating the demand; the evil traffickers are merely meeting that demand with a tragic supply.

The film often softened my heart to the peoples of Latin America.  It is no secret that I harbor some ill-will towards this population, from a sense of nationalism (I don’t want foreign invaders overrunning and terraforming the country into a Third World hellhole) and personal experience (I once read an online commenter state that anyone who has ever dated a Latina, as I have, deserves a Purple Heart).  They are people, and while I don’t think they have the right to flood across our border (also facilitated by human traffickers, the notorious coyotes), they don’t deserve slavery.  I can only pray that the many good people of Mexico, Central America, and South America will rise up against the evil in their countries.

Finally, the film makes a compelling argument for international cooperation to end child sex trafficking and other forms of human trafficking.  Ballard’s boss correctly states that he can’t send an agent for Homeland Security on an international abolitionist crusade.  Ballard does what any good American would do and improvises, seeking to work outside the limits of bureaucracy (while still acting legally) to liberate children and bring Rocio home to her father.  America certainly has ample problems at home, but in this area, engagement with the world is a positive good—and that’s coming from a relative isolationist.  The film’s depiction of the international drug trade and its reliance on trafficked slave labor also makes a strong argument for why we should continue the War on Drugs, although that point is far more debatable.

Sound of Freedom is hard to watch at times.  Most viewers will cry.  I certainly shed a few tears.  But as hard as it is to watch a fictionalized account of real events, imagine how much more terrible the sexual exploitation of young children really is.  The least we can do is sit through a two-hour-fifteen-minute movie about it.  Americans—certainly every Christian—has a moral obligation to see this film.