On the surface, FREEDOMLAND's a good movie. Samuel L. Jackson and Edie Falco deliver solid, watchable performances, while Julianne Moore is AMAZING. Plus, the visuals are chilling. But it's all undone by Richard Price's script, based on his own novel. The film just never gives its' ideas and sub-plots satisfying conclusions and the two main issues, missing children and racism-inspired violence, have been covered with much more compassion and intelligence in other films. This one falls into a weird mid-area: It's too harsh to "enjoy," but too generic and thin to "get" on a deeper level. So you're left with good actors doing good jobs in a film which just can't keep its' head above water. I guess it's what Sony gets for hiring the director of CHRISTMAS WITH THE KRANKS, AMERICA'S SWEETHEARTS, and REVENGE OF THE NERDS II to direct a Oscar hopeful with dark themes!

C

What he said...

7.7/10

C

An okay film that could've been great in the hands of a better director. Samuel L. Jackson and Julianne Moore deliver solid performances as the leads (although Moore overacts near the end, probably a fault of director Joe Roth). The supporting cast, including Edie Falco, Ron Eldard, Aunjanue Ellis and William Forsythe, is also strong. In particular, Falco delivers a standout performance. Her touching scene with Moore in the film actually feels completely genuine, unlike many of the things going on around it. The film has a lot to say but doesn't get its points across that well, leaving a disjointed, choppy feel to the proceedings. It's emotionally overwraught but does contain some nice scenes. This is one of those movies that feels like it could've been great if just a few things had gone differently, but instead it settles for being a very moderate success. C+

even though the movie isn't that good as a whole, it is worth seeing for the individual acting performances as stated above.

Its really hard to grade this one.

On the surface it was good, it had some interesting concepts and a great build-up early on. That being said it sort of meddles around for the first hour or so and doesn't establish anything. What should have been spent building tension for the resulting race conflict, and a completely unexplained resolution, was spent with a teary-eyed Julianna Moore delivering a weak, but emotionally impacting performance.

In the end, it doesn't quite delve deep enough in to what it presents. Its a decent film that could have been so much better with a more refined screenplay and a better editor.

B-

It had potential, but the film is all messed up. The performances were decent, although Julianne Moore really overacted. And the ending is terrible, too.

C-

Except I'm going one notch lower.

There are way too many ideas here for a 110 minute film. Everything is just all over the place. To Jackson's credit, he delivers a solid performance, along with Edie Falco, but Julianne Moore for the first time ever is just not good.

D+

Aside from Samuel L. Jackson the film is tripe.

It's completely based on the 1995 novel, which itself seems to largely take a lot of cues from the 1994 real life story of Susan Smith, who first claimed her children were kidnapped in a car, and later the car turned up driven into a lake with the kids inside, killed by Susan herself.

Freedomland (which really is a poor title for at least the movie adaptation) concerns itself with the social fallout of that episode by amping it up into an stretched boiling point and throws every stereotype of whites, blacks, policemen, etc. in an attempt to... well... do something.

Julianne Moore isn't believable for a half a second in this film, and her first scene (and the fact that she didn't immediately tell the police her child was in the car) gives away almost the whole movie in the first 20 minutes. Then it rambles on and on, the viewer is left with only one person to sympathise with, and that's Samuel L. Jackson's character.

The movie rambles on and on and when the story is basically resolved, it builds into a riot for another 10 minutes and then on to some meaningless finale.

I saw this with my mom, when we first put in the movie I said it was "... like Julianne Moore's child gets carjacked or something", prompting her to ask if we were going to watch "the one with aliens". When I told her it was a different movie she told me that Julianne Moore is a bad movie mother Being that she apparently has a dead son in Children of Men, it's hard to deny that

A candidate for worst film of the year. Terrible on every level.

F