>>REVIEW
FREEDOMLAND
STARRING Samuel L. Jackson, Julianne Moore and Edie Falco
DIRECTED BY Joe Roth
Opens Friday, February 17
Check listings
All good movies are good in their own way. All bad movies are tediously alike.
This one adheres scrupulously to a formula – where serious filmmakers and overwrought actors join the race for next year’s Oscars, by going through the motions in order to stand out come nomination time.
Bad acting? Check. Previous Academy Award winner Julianne Moore who plays the anguished mother of a four-year-old boy inadvertently kidnapped when her car is stolen, reels about the screen weeping and fainting and hitting herself (those in the acting profession call this "emoting"), only calming down when required to make an impassioned speech about how much her son means to her or how badly she wants him back. In contrast, Academy Award nominee Samuel L. Jackson, as the detective in charge of the case, tempers his performance with what a more forgiving critic might call gravitas, but which I, who have just had to sit through this film, call boredom.
Bad dialogue? Check. The characters don’t talk so much as exchange overwrought monologues that could only have come from the pen of a screenwriter with Oscar ambitions.
Bad storytelling? That, too. Plot holes large enough to build your summer home in, threads woven in and out and then dropped altogether. Take, for example, the short, utterly incongruous scene in the middle of the film, where Jackson visits a man, who we later learn is his son, in jail. A kinder, gentler, more generous critic might call this a stab at character development. In fact, it’s only here so Academy Award nominee Samuel L. Jackson can, at the end of the movie, deliver an impassioned speech about the trials and tribulations of parenting, the virtues of forgiveness, the resilience of the human spirit and something else – I forget. Besides, did we not get all the character development we could possibly handle in the fact that Jackson has an asthma inhaler?
Bad directing? Check. Rather than taking the maverick gambit of crediting his audience with an active intelligence, Joe Roth (Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise) prefers to drive all his points home with railroad spikes – as when, for example, desperate to somehow impress upon his viewers that Moore is distressed by her son’s disappearance, he dedicates some two or three minutes to the mother’s slow-motion hallucination of the boy sitting in a chair in the hospital waiting room. We know it is a hallucination because – suddenly – the boy disappears. Close-up of Moore’s reaction – her face falls. Not only that, she falls, unconscious, to the floor. And scene. And applause. And the Oscar goes to. |
Copyright ©2006 FFWD. All rights reserved.