As long as you don't think about the police barriers, that is.
When a movie sports good and bad traits in roughly equal proportion, the temptation is to rate it according to whatever one has just seen-the way you stick your toe in a lukewarm post-sauna plunge and pronounce it freezing. If you walk out of
Date Movie
into
Freedomland
, you'll be profoundly grateful for its fine performances and occasionally vigorous script, if also taken aback by some bewilderingly awful direction. If, however, you're coming out of any of this year's Oscar nominees, your eye rolls will probably be audible to the other audience members.
***image1*** Samuel L Jackson stars as Lorenzo Council, police detective with a projects beat in Dempsy, NJ. It's a pretty typical night for him and partner Bobby (William Forsyth) on the job in the largely African-American-populated Anderson Houses-a little pot, some domestic violence, a bit of petty vandalism-when a carjacking's called in. Brenda Martin (Julianne Moore) wanders disoriented and bleeding into the Dempsy ER claiming that an unknown black assailant threw her from her Toyota and drove away-and that her 4-year-old son was asleep in the back seat. Upon hearing this last startling piece of information, Lorenzo begins hyperventilating and fumbling for his asthma inhaler, while the cops from nearby white township Gannon, including Brenda's hot-tempered brother Danny (Ron Eldard), waste no time in putting Anderson behind barricades and under lockdown, much to the indignation of its residents. In the meantime, missing-child search organizer Karen Collucci (Edie Falco) and her team of volunteers decide the most logical place to begin looking for the little boy is in the spooky buildings of
Freedomland
, an abandoned foster-care facility, while Lorenzo comes to feel increasingly mistrustful of Brenda and her story.
Fortunately,
Freedomland
has three incredible actors all struggling to do their best with the hands they've been dealt, which are reasonably lousy (especially in the case of Ms. Moore, miscast from the get-go). Edie Falco would be absorbing to watch if all she were doing was posing as the Virgin Mary in the block party nativity scene. And that's a good thing, because otherwise
Freedomland
suffers from fatal genre confusion. It's a Lifetime television missing-kid movie; no, it's a Spike Lee joint about racial tensions between communities. It's an underdog-cop-finally-makes-good movie; no, it's a lady-gone-bonkers movie. The classically trained Sam Jackson, usually infinitely better than his projects (
The Man
with Eugene Levy being but a recent example), is sharp and accurate in his portrayal of the morally exhausted Lorenzo, though he's given some lugubrious dialogue.
It's a mystery how producer and former Disney chairman Joe Roth ever got attached to this project in the first place (his worst directorial effort might have been Christmas with the Kranks, were it not for the fact that he was also responsible for the dire
America's Sweethearts
, to say nothing of
Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise
). Roth seems to have used HBO as his own personal casting agency, with the result that, at times, the film seems like a pastiche of much better TV shows like
Oz
or
The Sopranos
. As for
Clockers'
author Richard Price, he has a brief cameo as an attorney near the end, and looks properly abashed about turning his own solid novel into a lumpily uneven and often grandiloquent screenplay. But
Freedomland's
got one thing going for it, anyway: It's sure not
Date Movie
.
