Customer Reviews

Freedomland [UMD for PSP]

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(20)
1 star:		(24)

 

 

The way I see it, a good movie has to have a sturdy structure in order to support the weight of its characters and plot. If this idea falls through, then all you'll have is an incoherent mess. "Freedomland," unfortunately, falls into this category. It had so many missing pieces that its structure pretty much collapsed the moment it started. No, that's actually too limiting: the pieces were never together to begin with. Everything about this film was out of place and chaotic, a haphazardly strewn together story that only resulted in a jumbled mass of wrongfully conceived ideas.

The movie begins in the streets of an urban housing project in Dempsy, New Jersey. There we meet Lorenzo Council (Samuel L. Jackson), a police detective who seems to know everyone in the neighborhood but isn't exactly up to speed on all of its problems. One of the women continually nags him to do something about her abusive boyfriend, and Council continually tells her that he'll take care of it as soon as he can. Right from the start, he seems burned out and detached, something that other officers have picked up on. They were noticeably standoffish and haughty. Obviously, some would rather not work with him. Exactly why is never really explained, a fact that only serves to make the many moments of mounting tension and hostility seem ill fitting.

Council is thrown into a web of mystery when Brenda Martin (Julianne Moore) walks into Dempsy Medical Center. Her hands are covered in blood, and she's mentally cut off from the world. Council is called in to question her. For a while she's evasive, and occasionally seems to be rambling. Eventually, she says that, while taking a shortcut through the park next to the housing project, she was carjacked by a black man. She also says that her son, Cody, was still inside the car.

This prompts the complete shutdown of the neighborhood, an act that angers many of the residents (usually to the point of physical altercations). No one is allowed to enter or leave. As if this weren't bad enough, Council's personal interest in finding Brenda's missing son has landed him in hot water with his superiors. Brenda's brother, Danny (Ron Eldard), is also not too fond of Council. We never really find out why, though. Maybe it's because he's also a police detective. Or maybe it's because of the past he shared with his sister. But these are only guesses; everyone in this movie is so one-dimensional that guesses are all we have to go on. This is especially true of Danny; his appearances are so sparse that his inclusion was completely unnecessary.

Council becomes increasingly suspicious of Brenda; he notices that many of her claims don't seem to add up. Right from the start, it's obvious that there's more to Brenda than meets the eye. It continues all the way through the film, most prominently displayed through her never-ending mental patient type of behavior. She's constantly walking around in a confused stupor, and there never seems to be a moment when her cheeks aren't wet with tears. Julianne Moore delivers a performance that's nothing more than overacting, and it very quickly becomes exhausting to watch her. By the time I got to the ending, I'd lost all traces of compassion for her. She was one of those characters I wished I could slap in the face while screaming, "Snap out of it!"

One of the film's biggest problems is the number of subplots that are left dangling before I had a chance to experience them. Let me give you an example: we eventually learn that Council has a son in prison named Jason (Dorian Massick). The moments they're together are presented so insignificantly that it comes off as nothing more than filler material. Had this subplot been followed through, it could have been powerful and dramatic. Here's another example: we're introduced to a group of women dedicated to finding lost or abducted children. In charge of the group is the dedicated Karen Collucci (Edie Falco). Her personal story (which I won't reveal) is somewhat compelling, but it was brought up too late in the game for me to take any real interest. Even the location of Freedomland, a padlocked and abandoned children's asylum, remains in the shadows. Its only significance is that it doubles as the film's title.

This is one of those movies that can't decide what it wants to be. On the one hand, we have the mystery surrounding Brenda and the search for her missing son. On the other hand, we have a commentary on race relations between blacks and whites. These are fine in and of themselves, but put together, they're completely incompatible (at least they were in this film). Even more unsettling is the way race is portrayed. There have certainly been plenty of films that tackle the subject of race in effective, thought provoking ways. But in this case it comes off as a way to exploit negative, unfounded stereotypes. We have the abusive boyfriend who smuggles drugs. We have the strong willed community leader who takes an aggressive stand against authority figures (at one point, he distributes t-shirts displaying the suspect's sketch, claiming the face represents all and none of the people). We even have the obligatory riot scene between the residents and law enforcement. While all this manages to convey the point that the road to understanding and tolerance is rocky and turbulent, it still fails to instill compassion. Maybe if it had actually connected with the story of Cody and his mother, it might have had some merit.

"Freedomland" unfairly left me with more questions than answers and cruelly twisted my anticipation into disappointment. I resented the fact that I had to leave the theater without gaining some minute sliver of insight. For a film that dares to take on such controversial topics, it was the least they could have done.

This is a muddled mess of a movie, although it seems promising at first. A mother is dragged from a car and her young son is left behind, to be driven off in the car by the hijackers.

Unfortunately, everything goes downhill from here. There are plot lines that go nowhere and long pieces of the story that don't seem to connect to other parts. Even worse, the mother isn't treated in a believable way by the police. She may be in danger but they actually leave her alone at certain points.

Anyway, it was just a jumbled hodge podge of a movie. Deeply regretted seeing it. Liked the book, though.

Samuel L. Jackson has long been one of my favorite actors, but has almost made it a habit of choosing really bad roles that don't even try to showcase his talent. In this movie, he returns to form a little bit. Two of the most common roles you see Jackson in are as a bad guy (Jackie Brown, Pulp Fiction) or as a cop/goverment guy (XXX, Freedomland). No matter what he's playing (unless it's in a bad movie) he does it perfectly. "Freedomland" is about an asthmatic New Jersey detective named Lorenzo Council, who spends his time trying to keep violence down in a small N.J. city. Then, Brenda Martin (a blonde Julianne Moore) comes into the picture claming that her car was jacked by a black man and that her 4-year old son was in the backseat. Lorenzo feels for Brenda, but also senses something wrong with her story. Anyway, if you've seen the preview for the film then you know that Freedomland is the name of a children's asylum...The preview made this asylum look like a big part of the movie and it's not. The asylum, Freedomland is used as a metaphor more than anything. Edie Falco (The Sopranos) also stars as Karen, a woman who leads a team to help find missing children and Ron Eldard playing the same d**kheaded character he's played in several other movies (House of Sand and Fog, Sleepers). Anyway,
the movie gives away it's big secret a little to early although many people will hardly notice. The movie paces nicely for an hour before leading to the big plot points. The dialogue is really good, Jackson sounds like he's saying leftover stuff from "Jackie Brown" at times. Moore needs to keep her red hair, but her performance is really good. This is an entertaining movie that also fits in some political views about racism...It's no masterpiece but it's definitely worth checking out.

GRADE: A-

When rambling Brenda Martin (Moore) arrives at a hospital bloody and mumbling about a carjacking and her four-year-old son being kidnapped, detective Lorenzo (Jackson) suspects she is talking about. When Brenda's brother who us a police man shuts down the area where the incident took place in an attempt to trap the kidnapper, it creates tension between the blacks and the whites in the community. As Lorenzo presses the tight-lipped Brenda to tell what really happened with her son, the insubordinate community threatens to rebel if the police don't go away. Moore, a talented actress with a torrent of diverse roles under her belt, looks - like her character - confused as to how she should play her role. Jackson is in similar territory, as his honorable cop role never impresses and I am personally disappointed that not even one of my favorite actors can get his role together to make this movie work. Freedomland never attempts to stand out from the crowd and travels along slowly until the thud of the irrelevant ending.

I went to this movie solely for the performances of Sam Jackson and Julianne Moore...And with the hope that the movie would be amazingly written and soar high above it's TV movie premise. Nope.

Every stereotype of every movie and TV crime drama that you've seen dealing with a race, crime and an angry black community versus police is right here... with no deviation. Or elevation.

The thing that bothered me about the other reviews on this movie was that they'd mention Freedomland's 'commentary on race' without adding the neccesary "stale" before the word "commentary". If you've seen movies that deal with the subject matter in this movie and you think you know what is going to happen in this movie...YOU ARE EXACTLY RIGHT. Every cliche and stereotype you can think of with the themes of ' poor black community versus the cops' is right here:

Angry, abusive young black men who are like children, angry bitter black women who are more like mothers than mates to their lovers, the angry ghetto citizens versus the cops, Angry riot scene, the angry brother cop, an almost monolithic angry black community who move as one (like the Borg in Star Trek) and incompetent superiors in the police department...

And Sam Jackson...Angry as usual. Though less so than past performances. He's mellowed. I liked him and his performance, but he isn't breaking any ground or giving a "balls to the walll" performance here.

Also, if you think you know who's responsible for the boy's dissapearance from the first two minutes of the movie (during the opening credits, no less), then you're right in that assumption, too.

Julianne Moore..was annoying. But I blame the writers. I believe Moore took one look at the script and said "This character is grating and the dialogue sucks...I have to go over the top with this to make it interesting". Her decision to go over the top grated even more. I was dissapointed with her character and the decisions she HAD to make as an actress. Her diatribes were contrived, and while it may have been conceived as oscar bait, it is not oscar-bait, because it is sooo corny. Oscar wouldn't go near that. The only good thing that can come from that acting caper is that it may end the streak of actors who get nominated for Oscar by playing a mentally challenged character.

The movie would've gotten 2 and a half stars, but a half a star is taken away for Julianne Moore's awful character and performance and a whole star is subtracted because this movie wasn't written; it was photocopied from other scripts about unrest in the black community.

Nit picks:

1)One of the characters makes a decision that will bring hell down on this ghetto project, even though that person knows the people in this project and supposedly has nothing against them.

2)You know how, in the movies when a character has just awakened after a hell of a night, just had the fight of her life or is on her death bed, but the actress looks like she's just had her makeup applied perfectly and her hair 'messed up' in a perfectly sexy style? You think "that's unrealistic".

I used to think that. But looking at this movie, with most of the women (with the exception of Anjanue Ellis..The woman is fine) looking like utter hell, I was thinking...put some makeup on her please. The makeup people went out of their way to make everyone look plain, pale and sickly. Moore, who I think is beautiful, looked like Gollum in this movie.

3)At one point in the movie Sam Jackson goes to visit his grown son, who is in prison. The boy has a horrendous tattoo of Tupac on his arm and says "I was gonna get Tiger Woods, but that wouldn't have went down to well with the brothers in here." I don't think a picture of *any* man on your arm is gonna go down too well in prison. Or anywhere else for that matter.

4)When Edie Falco,(who plays the mother of a kid who's been missing over a decade) hypothetically begs her son's killer to tell her where her son's body is, and she changes the name of the killer in the middle of her speech, it's supposed to be a breathtaking moment, but it is contrived.
(Still, Falco won me over. She is a brilliant actress that could do that with the superfluous speeches she's given.)

5.) The race riot that happens at the end of the movie doesn't make sense. At the start of the movie, the cops shut down the projects because a white kid was presumed to kidnapped in that community. But the crime that brought them there had been solved near the end of the film. However, some of cops were still in the projects, surrounding that community. There should have been no battalion of police in riot gear outside that project, and no riot. But since this is a cliche movie, we had to have the cliche riot.

This movie was as stale as four day old popcorn. Pure TV Movie tedium. I wasted my money going to see this film. I won't underestimate my ability to read a film from the previews next time.

This is a movie full of lofty, important ideas...in its own mind. Because there are so many twists, it's difficult to talk about it all without spoiling things...but let's just say it FREEDOMLAND thinks it has earth-shattering things to say about race relations, missing children, mental-illness and so forth.

It starts out well enough. We meet Samual Jackson, a tough-talking but secretly sensitive cop who seems to be personally responsible for all police work done in a poor project. He knows everyone personally in this run-down complex, and they know him and expect him to look out for them. He's called to interview a dazed and bloodied woman who has wandered into the local hospital, apparently the victim of a carjacking. The woman, played by Julianne Moore, is clearly in shock, and it takes awhile for her to reveal (or remember)that her 4-year-old son was asleep in the backseat when the car was taken. Jackson mobilizes the police, and then it turns out that Moore's brother (Ron Ellard) is a cop from another district, who decides he wants to run the investigation his way, by totalling shutting off the black projects from the rest of the world, essentially putting its residents into house arrest. Unrest begins to foment.

That's enough of a setup for a tense movie right there, but it gets clumsy and confused from there. We think we're watching a thriller...but it isn't really. We think confrontation is coming between Ellard and Jackson, but the brother's character almost totally disappears from the movie.

Instead, as Jackson becomes more suspicious of Moore's story...it becomes a rumination of sorts on the plight of missing children. Edie Falco is introduced as the leader of a group of "concerned parents" who dedicate themselves to finding missing kids.

I think I'd better stop there with plot details...just in case you decide to see this jumble of ideas masquerading as a meaningful movie.

Jackson, Moore and Falco all have long speeches at various times in the film, all clearly conceived to be used as clips to be shown during awards shows. The actors are then allowed to indulge themselves by chewing into the scenery along with the lines they must deliver. All three are fine actors, but here the script betrays them. Moore comes off the worst...her character is established as a simple woman (with a thick inner-city accent) who might be bordering on mentally challenged. Or is she simply hysterical from the shock of what's happened to her son? We never know for certain, but when she launches into one of her lengthy, Oscar-bait speeches...she suddenly becomes a poet of sorts, full of amazing insights into her own plight and capable of sweeping rhetoric. Not a moment of it is believable or moving. Falco doesn't fare much better during one scene where she sits close to Moore and tries to draw her out. The subject she is discussing (the loss of her own child) is painful, but the speech is like nothing a real person would actually ever say. Jackson also has some purple prose to contend with, but it is slightly more credible...although by the time the movie is nearing its end, we're pretty tired of his wisdom and sensitivity.

Frankly, we're just tired of the whole thing. It feels like a three hour movie...although it's less than 2 hours. It feels like a movie that SHOULD have left the viewer moved and thoughtful...but I was left totally cold, and my gauge of the audience's reaction leads me to believe most of them felt the same. "What was that?" was my primary thought at the end. All these great actors, totally wasted, and all these important issues forced together in an unpleasing way that allows none of them to resonate.

I see no reason for anyone to see this film. I hate to say that about a movie with two of my favorite actors, but it's best just to forget it and move on.

Freedomland (Joe Roth, 2006)

I have spent the past few years studiously avoiding blaming Spike Lee for the confused mess that was Clockers (though his subsequent movies have caused me to think he does deserve a good portion of the blame). I always shifted it to Richard Price, who wrote the original novel. Now we get another film adaptation of another Richard Price novel, where Price once again adapted the screenplay, and instead of a guy like Spike Lee-- who may be in a bumpy patch of his career, but man, the guy can nail the hide to the wall when he's on his game-- we get Joe Roth, responsible for such deathless cinematic fare as Revenge of the Nerds II and Christmas with the Kranks? Is there any way this film was not going to be a disaster?

Okay, so we cast Julianne Moore as a mother with a missing kid (hmm, there's a huge stretch) and Samuel L. Jackson as a cop (whoa, what casting bravery!). And that's pretty much your movie-- white woman gets carjacked in black area with kid in back of car, black cop doesn't quite buy it but is willing to go the extra mile anyway. Do you see the big twist coming?

The problem is that the big twist takes forever to get coming. Did we really need a full hour of explication to get that there's racial tension building, and that it's liable to explode at any moment? (Short answer: no.) I'm sure that in the novel, there's a wonderful parallel between the missing kid and the racial tension. It does not exist in the film, which treats when as two entirely separate, if overlapping, storylines for most of its length. The scenes where they do coincide seem extraneous at best and profoundly uncomfortable at worst. Add in a few unnecessary subplots and some attempts at character development-- though I should probably be giving points for the fact that attempts were made at all-- that are painfully obvious plot devices, and you get an endurance test rather than a film-- and not in a good way. Most of the acting here is marginal (with each passing Julianne Moore film, I wonder what happened to the actress whose small part in Hellcab had me riveted to the seat); Sam Jackson does his thing, and William Forsythe (The Devil's Rejects) has an amusing, if small, role as his partner. A few others are on the flip side of the coin, but mother always taught me that if I didn't have anything nice to say...

Ah, that's not true. I love excoriating people who turn in substandard (especially for them) performances. But why waste any more energy on a movie so aggressively mediocre? When a Sam Jackson movie has me squirming in my seat and wishing the DVD remote worked so I could fast-forward it and watch with subtitles, it's a hopeless case. So hopeless I can't even bring myself to give it the trashing it truly deserves. I'll leave you to do that yourself. *

This movie was absolutely awful. Laughable. I progressively got angrier at Julianne Moores character. The woman goes through the movie in an absolute daze. She was so pathetic. So overacted. The movie started off great and then became a lame mess. I kept waiting for some kind of climax or resolution. Some "twist" that would make the 2 hours of life I gave up watching this piece of junk meaningful, but to no avail. I can't believe movies like this get made, and I waste my time watching them.

"Freedomland" is a mess. The basic premise: a woman, Brenda (a glammed down, scenery chewing{think about that horrifying and effective scene of Moore in "Magnolia" in which she goes off on the pharmacist...now times it times 50} from the usually effective Julianne Moore) has her car snatched, walks to the hospital with her hands bloodied and after about 15 minutes declares to a "counselor-defender," Lorenzo Council (an intense Samuel L. Jackson who tries his level headed best to make sense of his part and this movie) that her son was in the back seat. This sets off a change of events that strains credulity at best and at worst has you scratching your head and wondering why you've spent your hard earned money on this crock.
Nothing much works here and all the disparate elements: police brutality, racial profiling, child and spousal abuse instead of adding up to something important add up instead to an overheated hodge podge of a well made but silly melodrama.

You've heard of feel-good movies? Well, this is a feel-bad movie. Once you see it, you don't want to see it again. It's that depressing. This movie is another attempt to try and teach bigots how bad African-Americans have it in the projects. While that is true for the innocent of the people living there trying to live their lives over there, the attempts here end up making the movie too preachy. There's one scene where Jackson's character, Det. Council, wants to ignore his present case, Julianne's missing child case, even though there are police on the scene, to handle a jumper who is about to jump out of a hi-rise window. The residents are upset in the movie, but, in real life? They would all be screaming "Jump! Jump!" and that's the truth because I've lived most of my life in the projects. And the people you see antagonizing the cops in this movie, you really end up hating. People have complained that the movie is disjointed. I agree. It goes from actually being a movie with a plot, to turning into an excuse to spew racist slurs to whites (and blacks who are then called "Uncle Toms") and make whites, again, nothing but racists and liars.

The movie is a festival of unlikable behavior on all sides. So, the lesson this movie is trying to teach the moviegoer becomes heavy-handed and hypocritical.

Julianne Moore is good as the pathetic lonely woman (who seems to constantly physically beat herself up and is, obviously, mentally unbalanced) and Samuel L. Jackson is, for the most part, very good as the caring detective who, although he is resentful because of sometimes perceived, other times factual indifference of police, he does his job dutifully. As times goes on, he realizes something about this case, doesn't sound right.

The scene as they walk through Freedomland is the depressing icing on the cake.