By Thor

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Norm Macdonald used to say, “If you can tell me one funny, socially relevant joke I’d give you a million dollars.” The man was a comedic genius, and while that doesnt make you fuckin’ Einstein I think he may have been onto something and it doesn’t end at jokes.

Nothing in this world is more stupid or dangerous than someone with a Christ complex meeting a singular financial backer willing to turn that into a movie. Do you hear that? If a stranger approaches you in a van and says it’s full of money for you to make your incredibly important movie about the (Capital T) Truth, run, because you’re not being trafficked but you are going to make something truly awful.

We live in truly stupid times. Senile men litter the halls of the White House with their soiled Depends and every bird-brained person you know is either scrying ghost stories or prophecies from their incoherent death rattles. And yet somehow it’s all very boring.  So naturally movies, the things that reflect our unconscious, are getting really dumb at the same rate or faster than they are tedious. One would think Hollywood being vaguely progressive (I know I know) and trending towards the bland, that the interesting things might actually, for once, come from the reactionary mind, but this goes down to the bone not stopping at “Liberal Hollywood”. Not only are the reactionaries total dog brains, but movies have sucked long enough that everyone has absorbed the same cinematic language. Now, I’ve become sick on the melodrama that is the  genre I’m calling  “Important-movie-that-you-have-to-watch”, or just the “Important genre” for short.

Enter Sound of Freedom, a movie confused all the way down to its title. Seriously, what the fuck does that have to do with this movie and what does freedom sound like? Perhaps it’s the sound of a cash register as this film conspicuously grossed the same opening box office as Indiana Jones, and yet also because the crucial point this movie doesn’t want you to miss is that child trafficking is really lucrative. The perfect message for a down economy. (Not to diminish the fact that the organization this movie depicts actively creates a market for trafficking, but this isn’t meant to be my soap box.)

Let’s hit the basics. It looks like a movie. Someone clearly knew how to point a camera where the acting was happening, and they made sure the lights were on in the room while they did it so congratulations are in order. The acting and writing are another story entirely.

The acting isn’t particularly inspired, frankly Jim Caviezel should be crucified again, but it suffers acutely from “generic white guy face”. So many white bros playing essentially the same guy leads to everyone’s worst nightmare; your grandma leaning over and saying, “Now which one is he?” over and over again. Don’t believe me? Go see the movie yourself. Its all old people in the theater so there is this low resonant hum of people asking each other who-is-who, like a convention for people with face blindness, or your grandma in Chinatown.

I was going to draft a full paragraph about the writing being void for continuity sake, but it is hard to get the blood pumping to hate this movie. Sure it espouses white hat pedophilia, and even while I’m writing this sentence I’m shocked at just how little it moved the needle. The writing is far too empty to warrant anything but a nap. The tone can’t hold water and the plot has a confusion to it that reminds you of a long story told by a habitual liar. Through this all I couldn’t shake the feeling that the ghost of something  is haunting this dry, chewy, flavorless attempt at what should be an incredibly colorful Q-pilled blockbuster. WHY can’t they make this interesting? And then it hit me. 

Taken. Taken. Fucking network TV rerun favorite Taken.

Hear me out; if you want to support a right-wing anti-child trafficking movie at least make it interesting. A proposition given the subject matter that is in no way daunting. Taken truly has everything a reactionary heart could want: child trafficking, pissed boomer white dad protagonist, post 9-11 racism (surprisingly still warm for a movie made in 2008), torture, hatred/ fear of Bono, and in spite all of that it SLAPS.

It’s not Shakespeare, but the writing is serviceable, but GOD DAMN is “I have a very particular set of skills…” as the sizzle line is far more enthralling, and starkly less clownish than “Never trust a pedophile.” NO FUCKIN’ SHIT THAT’S THEIR ONE-LINER. 

The ex-wife (so very important that she’s an ex-wife) played by Famke Janssen is one dimensional and that dimension is “a cunt”. The daughter acts uncannily for her age. Looking like she’s approaching her lower 20s, being scripted as 17, but going apeshit over being gifted a pony. I was honestly so perplexed by that scene that I had to go back and make sure there weren’t bouncy castles in the background, and it turns out that was my own personal Mandela Effect. So the writers clearly have one expertise and it’s not women, it is sweet boomer shooter action. Let’s get to that shit!

The main character played by Liam Neeson was done competently, or at least he doesn’t sound that Irish. Which is stellar because his character is a CIA agent, and we all know those wasps would never let an Irishman in the CIA. They only sort of let one be president. Neeson carves a warpath through Paris that only the French could be truly proud of, and he does it by telling the pussy French government, his bitch ex-wife, and her rich cuck husband to lick his sack. If this doesn’t scream target demographic then I don’t know shit.

The set pieces are great. Paris is beautiful, even the basements where someone is being electrocuted to death. Additionally everyone loves a nice scene where they destroy a construction site and in this one the site had it coming to it, because it was housing a stolen woman brothel. 

I mentioned Q-pilled before and I plan to feed you some “bread crumbs”. The action is almost always on one and eventually he gets to the truth that we should all have realized by now which is that other white people (probably CIA) and Middle East oil interests are in bed wringing their hands menacingly with each other on  this one. Some would call it capital, but who am I to judge if you wanna pretend it’s Tom Hanks and Chrissy Teigen making bids behind the other two-way mirrors (Seriously though check out some stuff about BCCI and maybe a bit about the Bush family’s connection to the bin Ladens. Okay I’m done with that, moving on).

Normals, as much as cranks, are going to flock to Sound of Freedom regardless of its inconsistent yet flat tone, its copy paste cast, or its hole riddled plot. None of this is surprising. The subject matter almost demands so much respect that it wouldn’t have mattered if they even wrote a story at all, but it’s a movie and I paid fuckin’ money. To quote Stan Marsh in the Passion episode of South Park, “This is America, and in America when something sucks you get your money back.” On the flip side, Taken crackles with a vitality vacant from SoF that makes one think perhaps the cranks are right and we have lost our balls to soy. While true the ole movie grinder no longer puts out the delectable Man On Fire (the OG kid stealing movie) part of that being Tony Scott’s death. It still can’t seem to manage a palatable Taken, and with the advent of Sound of Freedom we’ve proven that it has nothing to do with the Little Mermaid being black or “Libtard” SJW groomer drag queens; the machine is just tired and it’s putting out “very important” flavorless gruel. At least until the next Avatar movie comes out and we get to see sick blue cat people fuck up some human marines.