Movie Nation

A compelling hot-button subject and engrossing “true story” runs up against a ponderous script, pedestrian direction and the limited range of star Jim Caviezel in “Sound of Freedom,” a lumbering thriller about international child sex trafficking that flatlines when it’s meant to be moving, uplifting and inspiring.

If you can’t make a weeper out of a helpless, mostly Third World kids being lured away from their parents and snatched for online porn and prostitution to an audience that lines up to see every movie from the star of “The Passion of the Christ,” maybe you should watch some of the other films on this subject and see what you’re getting wrong.

Director Alejandro Montverde, who broke out in the faith-based corner of filmdom with his anti-abortion drama “Bella,” and Caviezel tell us the story of Homeland Security agent turned abducted child rescuer Tim Ballard, a veteran hunter of online “pedos” who has an abrupt, emotionally-lacking and dramatically-flat “conversion” from a guy who catches the “customers” in this heinous trade to a man who wants to save kids because “God’s children are not for sale.”

A colleague only has to mention how their work is seeing what a “sick world” this is a couple of times for Ballard to suddenly get up from his work computer, saunter (not storm) down to the most understaffed Homeland Security jail in America and cozy up to his latest bust, an ideologue who writes books about perverts’ insatiable lust for children, convince him he’s “one of us” and use the prisoner’s expertise to break into a Colombian child kidnapping ring.

Just like that, and with a single tear, shot in close-up, all that we get out of man-manikin Caviezel.

Tim makes his way to Colombia, working his way towards the “model” (Yessica Borroto Perryman) who recruits kids by convincing their Honduran (etc.) parents that “They should be in the entertainment business” (some scenes are in Spanish with subtitles) and the high roller Jeffrey Epstein types (unseen) who back this soulless recruiter.

Along the way, he links up with a Colombian cop (Javier Godino) who puts him in touch with a “cartel” veteran and ex-con who has experienced some sort of late-life conversion so that he’s saving kids his own way. The great character actor Bill Camp (“Birdman,” “Joker”) makes little attempt to go “Latin” here, feigning an accent for roughly half a scene, letting his Panama hat, Hawaian shirt and omnipresent cigar establish his Colombian cartel bonafides.

Tim, who takes on the name Spanish version of the name, “Timoteo,” will try to hunt down and free two Honduran kids who we see snatched thanks to their gullible father’s compliance in the opening sequence, setting up a Cartegena sting and even plunging into the “rebel” packed jungles to fulfill his personal mission.

We also see Tim’s big family and home life, with Oscar winner Mira Sorvino here to weep or be on the verge of tears in every appearance. Kurt Fuller plays the overly-sympathetic Homeland Security boss who doesn’t do much to corral this agent who’s “going rogue.”

“We’re Homeland Security! We can’t go rescuing Honduran kids in Colombia!”

And we’re treated to Caviezel’s attempts to smile — an unnatural act throughout his career — and show us the motivations, passions and vigilante-level fury this law enforcement office feels about this new mission he’s suddenly taken on.

The villainous characters are caritactures, but I didn’t buy virtually any of the performances. And “Sound of Freedom’s” funereal pacing and struggling manipulations left me cold, when I was expecting big emotional moments that never came. Movies like “Trade,” “The Whistleblower” and even the similar “Trade of Innocents” wrung more emotion out of this subject.

But “Sound of Freedom,” which takes its title from a children’s clapping game and our young victim (Cristal Aparicio) humming the movie’s theme song, relies on closeups of Caviezel’s inexpressive face to carry the story. It’s not enough.

Caviezel made it his business to cynically pander to this conservative religious “QAnon” friendly audience, long before he starred in TV’s “Person of Interest,” which was canceled because he’s just not an interesting, expressive actor person.

When your movie is “presold” by marketing, tagged with an appeal to “buy more tickets” to make it appear more popular than it is, you’re all but ensuring its profitability. Presold, extolling the values of a faith-based film even if this isn’t wholly confined to that genre, maybe you don’t try as hard to give it heart and get it right.

Rating: PG-13, violence, children in sexual jeopardy subject matter, profanity

Cast: Jim Caviezel, Bill Camp, Cristal Aparicio, Javier Godino, Lucás Ávila, Yessica Borroto Perryman, Kurt Fuller and Mira Sorvino.

Credits: Directed by Alejandro Montverde, scripted by Rod Barr and Alejandro Monteverde. An Angel Studios release.

Running time: 2:15

This Paramount release is coming in January, which suggests the studio doesn’t sense “Oscars” in a genre film that has long been an Academy favorite, but that maybe they had some notion it could be a contender.

Usually they advertise a film with Oscar hopes based on limited release “Christmas” or thereabouts.

TV star Kingsley Ben-Adir has the title role, and there’s not a lot of household names in the cast. The director of “King Richard” was behind the camera, so we’re allowed to hope for greatness.

Jan. 12

“Employee of the Month” is a dark comedy about a woman away under a soul crushing patriarchy only to have fellows who won’t promote her or plan on stealing her raise if she’s ever given one.

And then a Black intern shows up and gives her the spine to fight back, and maybe over up injuries and deaths of repressors.

I liked it. It’s harmless enough, pretty mild mannered in a “Nine to Five” sense.

But when I offered to donate it to this suburban Orlando library, located in an old hotel on the Northside of town, the young librarian looked as if I’d offered her a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book.

Fear driven by a nation wide right wing assault on libraries, science, history and truth, no doubt.

I’ve been donating DVDs and books for years and this is the first time this has happened.

Life under a Nazi regime in The Banana Republic of Florida. Nooo, “It can’t happen here ”

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Genre fans can pretty much tell when a Western is “off” just from a glance, and “Dead Man’s Hand” doesn’t pass that “This looks like a West that’s lived in” test.

But as this horse opera’s from the director of “The 2nd,” “Chokehold” and “Rottentail,” a “genre” specialist whose “genre” is stumbling formula B-and-C movies, one doesn’t get one’s hopes up. One mustn’t.

It’s got lovely, undeveloped Greater Sante Fe settings, some decent displays of horsemanship and amusing if not dazzling gunplay. Director and co-writer (it’s adapted from a comic book) Brian Skiba landed Cole Hauser, Brian Dorff, Costas Mandylor and Skiba’s pal Coren Nemec for his supporting cast.

The dialogue’s laced with anachronisms, the theme song is electrified country rock. But hell, they got the poker hand right. There’s something unexpected in the results when our hero draws a “Dead Man’s Hand,” which as any Western fan remembers is aces over eights.

Jack Kilmer — the son of you-know-her and you-know-who — brings strong (?) Zach Braff energy as a gambler/gunfighter named Reno, just married to the sagebrush sex worker Vegas (Camille Collard). They’e on their way to buy a saloon in Nevada when they’re waylaid by desperados in Confederate jackets, whom Jean-Jacques Renault dispatches with alacrity.

But dragging the gray-uniformed dead to the next town does Reno no favors. The saloon is filled with unconstructed Confederates and adorned with a stars and bars just above the bar. The “mayor” (Stephen Dorff) is former Col. Clancy T. Bishop, CSA.

The phrase, “What the hell, don’t you know the war is over?” pops up once or twice.

Reno’s a dead man, with or without that poker game where they “play for keeps,” with or without the help of the U.S. Marshal (Hauser) who’s come to town to take in Bishop, or aid by the livery stable owner (Vincent E. McDaniel) or the divine intervention of a wry Native American (Mo Brings Plenty).

The laughable elements include Kilmer, young enough to make this guy a pistol packing punk, but again “Zach Braff energy.” So, no. That’s not in the cards.

There’s a moment where Reno’s supposed to be shooting a rope about to hang somebody, and the take “One Take” Skiba uses plainly shows Kilmer discharging his rarely-reloaded six-shooter prematurely, as he’s raising it to aim it.

Vegas is ready for her nude bath with a nubile nude back-scrubber, a courtesy between “dance hall girl” sex workers in the Old West, I guess.

And Hauser and Dorff do what’s required of them, but a tad sheepishly, I must say.

The unintentional laughs pile up like corpses around almost every damned scene in this thing. Robbers refer to a stagecoach as a “wagon,” and considering the “stagecoach” has its canvas side covers rolled up and we can see one and all inside, only an unreconstructed Confederate would be dumb enough to ask “Got any women in there?” when two of them are in plain sight.

Once again, our director has tried his hand at injecting a little flashpoint politics into his tale. But at this point, one has to say that Skiba’s shown his cards in genre after genre after genre, and he’s still drawing nothing but deuces and one-eyed jacks, a loser’s hand every time.

The 2nd, Pursuit, Left for Dead

Rating: R, graphic violence, nudity, profanity

Credits: Directed by Brian Skiba, scripted by Corin Nemec and Brian Skiba, based on a graphic novel by Kevin Minor and Matthew Minor. A Lionsgate release.

Cast: Jack Kilmer, Stephen Dorff, Camille Collard, Costas Mandylor, Vincent E. McDaniel, Mo Brings Plenty, Corin Nemec and Cole Hauser

Running time: 1:35

Somebody was “picking up,” killing and dismembering gay men and dumping their body parts across rural New Jersey and Pennsylvania in the early 1990s.

And because the victims were gay and the little evidence at hand said they were “pick-up crimes,” commited after these men met their killer in a gay bar, it wasn’t hard to get the sense that the various police jurisdictions involved just didn’t give a damn.

“Last Call: When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York” is a quietly-compelling four-part documentary based on the true crime book by Elon Green, a film almost guaranteed to draw you in and just as certain to make you grind your teeth in fury at the missed opportunities, missed-clues and misapplication of justice by judges and juries when it came to punishing crimes against gay men.

Director and series co-creator Antony Caronna interviews lots of policemen who took on the various corners of this case, and a judge and a prosecutor. But he focuses most closely on the surviving family and friends of victims Thomas Mulcahy, Michael Sakara, Frederic Spencer, Anthony Marrero and Peter Stickney Anderson in painting a portrait of a slow-shifting American culture, a slow-footed justice system and the even slower-to-evolve attitudes of police about policing gay bashing.

When Caronna asks, off camera, “if there’s anything I didn’t ask” that should be brought up of two aged Pennsylvania State policemen, their defensive response, decades later, is that “the gay thing wasn’t really relevant to the investigation.” Thus, we “get it” even if they don’t.

With gay bashing on the rise and right wing governors and legislatures passing pro-discrimination and anti LGTBQ legislation folded into their inflamtory, violent rhetoric, we get the sense of what one activist describes as “being hunted” by hostile bigots, some of them moved by the violence of the rhetoric of that day, wasn’t just a fact of life 30, 40 and 50 years ago.

Homophobia feeds a “You deserved it” mindset about assaults and killings that hasn’t been buried to this day, and increasingly “militarized” police can be “indifferent” or downtright “hostile” to investigating crimes against gay and trans people, “Last Call” asserts.

Early episodes of the series give us details of this “closeted” father, that “dapper” banker and the other victims. Lives are fleshed-out beyond simple newspaper coverage. The mourning, for some relatives and friends, goes on.

Police investigators who agreed to appear on camera (and in phone interviews) second-guess themselves on what they missed here, what they NYPD and other jurisdiction compatriots screwed-up there.

And activists who once worked on the New York Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project and hosts of Gay News cable programs offer stats, maps and their take on the atmosphere of the day and the slow-to-change attitudes that alarmed them when the cases were active, and infuriate them still as America’s far right tries to turn the slightly-less-bad-days back to the awful old days of being gay in America.

We learn that the “gay and trans panic defense” can still be trotted out by gay bahsers/killers in more backward corners of the country.

The series’ somewhat excessive (repetition, etc.) length means we’re allowed to ponder the 50 years of history that play out in the milieus of the story’s various chapters, from “just after Stonewall” to AIDS era gay phobia and gay bashing to today.

Pop culture fans might note that this crime spree resembles William Friedkin’s then-scandalous thriller “Cruising,” which came out in 1980, over ten years before New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey police first realized they had multiple victims chopped up, plastic-bagged and left in dumpsters in multiple states.

But in that fictional and somewhat sensationalized film a dedicated cop goes deep undercover and comes to doggedly pursue the case until he gets his man. The so-called “Last Call” killer never inspired that level of dedication, and as activists complained, then and now, when there’s “no sign of the NYPD taking it seriously,” how can anyone feel safe?

Rating: TV-MA, violence.

Credits: Directed by Anthony Caronna, created by Caronna and Howard Gertler, based on a book by Elon Green. An HBO release.

Running time: Four episodes @:53-:60 minutes each

No singing. No dancing teapots or candelabras. No Disney. A bit horrific, as the French intended.

July 14.

If the pop powerhouse Wham! didn’t begin, progress to the “Top of the Pops” and end exactly this way — and it almost certainly did — it most certainly should have.

Chris Smith’s engaging, adorably upbeat portrait of the brief, brightest flash in the pan that was Wham! is mainly comprised of just two voices, the late George Michael in the extensive collection of archival interviews he did, and a present day remebrance from his “best mate,” his friend “from the age of 12” and Wham! co-founder, guitarist and fellow songwriter Andrew Ridgeley.

That narrow focus allows the film’s sunny disposition. None of the messiness and trauma of Michael’s later life and untimely death is here. That’s for other documentaries. This is just collaborating, performing, doing joint interviews and having a good time all along the way.

“What!” brings Ridgeley out of Michael’s shadow and into the spotlight where he comes off as a devoted friend, valued collaborator and the member of that group determined to make “a graceful exit” from that exhuberant, rowdy and stunningly successful performing group of their shared youth.

They made their “graceful exit” after a race to the top, with each of them the ripe old age of 23.

The chart-dominating Wham! was only together for four years. But it was a metoiric rize for two North London lads “fated” to to form “a brotherhood” from the moment twelve year old Ridgeley took “the new boy,” Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, under his wing to show him the ropes at Bushey Meade School in 1975.

Using home movies, primitive promotional videos (and outtakes) and TV appearances and live concert footage, Smith — who gave us “Tiger King” and the documentary about the symbiosis Jim Carrey achieved playing Andy Kaufman in “Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond” — paints a picture of two devoted determined to make it as a team and the odd, fate-kissed path that brought them success.

“Wham!” paints Ridgeley as the guy Michael credits with coming up with the group’s name and their first song, “Wham Rap,” the inspiration for “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” and their visual style. And most touchingly, it shows Ridgeley — in joint interviews back then and even now — as perfectly willing to take a back seat when it became obvious the pal he always called “Yog” (a shortening of Michael’s real name) was a genius at creating power pop sing-alongs and romantic ballads, writing, singing and producing them.

Ridgeley was also the one who considered their chart-topping group a phenomenon of youth — theirs, and their audience’s. That “bow out gracefully” thing was, he figured, the perfect way to “break up.”

None of this Simon & Garfunkel sturm und drang, none of the bitterness of most every other group — even siblings like the Everly Brothers — that came to an end.

They agreed to do a final Wembley Stadium show at their peak, in 1986. And “The Final” was their finale. Michael’s later death merely ensured they’d never be tempted into doing a “reunion” tour.

The film’s narrow focus — with only their manager, Simon Napier-Bell, appearing here to offer a slightly more objective take on the group dynamic, the psychologies behind their success and their decision to move on — renders it quite myopic.

Little revelations about the “political” climate and nature of their earliest songs, an antidote to Thatcherite Britain, can surprise. The “I’m gay” realization of George and how he told his friend is almost wholly lacking drama, because Ridgeley and Ridgeley’s ex-girlfriend, a singer with the group, were nothing but supportive.

And yes, that ex-girlfriend was there for the whole ride.

I’d have loved to hear from “the girls” they brought into Wham! who became a part of the stage show, the music videos and background vocals at times. If nothing else, they could have provided insights into the true nature of the team at the top.

But Smith has made a film that’s not unlike Wham!’s hits — bouncy, light and frothy, nothing that demands anything of the viewer and listener other than a smile.

Rating: TV-MA, profanity

Cast: George Michael, Andrew Ridgeley, Kyriacos Panayiotou and Simon Napier-Bell

Credits: Directed by Chris Smith. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:32

The first full trailer lays out the cast –Lilt Gladstone included — the historical backdrop and the stakes.

A bit of “The Aviator” about it, with themes similar to “Gang’s of New York.”

Oct. 6 in theaters, Apple TV+ to follow.

The summer blockbuster I’ve most been intrigued to see.

Tom Cruise treats these films like a covenant with the audience/fanbase. He does not break that covenant.

A solitary, older “Baker” “becomes the Butcher” in this man-takes-care-of-a-child he doesn’t know, and “takes care of business” thriller.

Looks good, and a lot like the Gena Rowlands “Gloria” and Jean Reno/Natalie P. “The Professional.”