It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Exploring racism and police misconduct in a mixed neighborhood, Freedomland had ambitious goals and tried to tell it's story without taking a position. As the film moves forward, it becomes very clear which way the films writers are leaning, and it defeats the films intended purpose. Julianna Moore plays a woman who claims she was carjacked in the black part of town. Samuel L. Jackson, one of the detectives assigned to the area, goes to investigate, and when he interviews the victim, she drops a bombshell, telling Jackson that her 5 year old son was in the car. We all know that Samuel L. Jackson is a legend and he performed like one in this film, but the problem was Julianne Moore. I get that she's playing a mother who is missing her kid, but she was so whiny and out of it the whole film, that every scene she was in was just painful to watch. Add to that the fact that she's trying to use some southern redneck accent, and she was barely understandable. A white woman claiming her child was kidnapped by a black man is the premise of the film and leads to the police putting down the hammer on the black part of town. It was a story that could have gone in so many terrific directions, but instead it falls flat on it's face, with nonsensical sub-plots, shotty performances, and of course a writer who did anything but tell his story objectively. The investigative part of the film was pretty interesting and Samuel L. Jackson is always great, but overall Freedomland is a cliché, that plays on racial conflict in order to get people to watch it.

I had heard nothing of this film before viewing it. I was going through movies on TV one night and stumbled across this purely because I noticed Samuel L. Jackson as the star. While it held my interest well enough, was competently made, and had a fairly cohesive script, something about this film doesn't work. "Freedomland" eschews action for some pedantic sociological musings on race, but fails to get anywhere or reach any conclusions because none of the provocative subject matter is really examined; just simply presented in the context of a tired, tired missing child story.The missing child scenario is nothing new. In fact, it's the subject of so many TV crime dramas as well as hour long forensic crime documentaries that frankly the very premise of this film has been beaten to death both from an entertainment and informational standpoint. What is meant to be the "big reveal" that heads up the third act is pretty well hammered into the viewer within the first however. There is no subtlety once the idea of Brenda being responsible is first (or subsequently) broached and there is never a bit of exposition to lead us to any other conclusion. Maybe this was intentional, but I tend to think not since the entirety of the third act is dedicated to understanding the details of the child's death and disposal. But even if the point was not to be engaged in the mystery, what we're left with is an unexplored and overblown study of where race, crime, and authority meet.Plenty of films have dealt with whites vs. blacks. A decent few have even explored reverse discrimination. What the purpose of this film was I could not say. The material wasn't presented in any sort of thought-provoking way. Instead, we get this completely overblown representation of how white cops deal with a black neighborhood where a black criminal might be hiding out. The housing project is laughably treated in a way reminiscent of fascist Germany with the white cops nothing more than mindless, bloodthirsty goons. Jackson attempts to be a sort of liaison between the two but ends up as some kind of pariah for both camps. His character's role in all the racial tension is very murky and undefined; I'm not really sure what he added as he did nothing to ease tensions or even get anyone to think about what the hell it was they were doing. To top it off, nothing is gained, learned, or even really lost at the end of it all. There's no way to even begin to think about the issue (not that it was terribly complex in the first place) due to the cartoonish detention of an entire housing project.Up until now, we just have a movie without a message. Not that it's a bad thing, but it also fails to entertain on a visceral level. Worst of all it wants to have a message, or make some kind of statement, but doesn't even come close. Sometimes, the performance of the actors is so engaging that it need not be flawless when it comes to things like "the plot." Here is where I am most disturbed by this movie; I cannot stand Julianne Moore's performance as Brenda. I don't know if I dislike it because the role is unnerving and supposed to be unnerving, or if it's bad acting. Moore is over the top and difficult to watch and impossible to like, but part of me thinks that all of this may actually be the point of her performance. Jackson is numbingly dull in his role as whatever he is. He generally has a knack for uttering hilarious lines at least once per movie (scratch Cleaner) but in Freedomland he is a perfunctory character making no use of his acting skills.I won't say the film has actual plot holes, but it does leave a lot of things unresolved that are specifically brought to the viewer's attention. Lorenzo's asthma, Brenda's history of drug use, her brother's Over Zealous 5000 role, the relevance of the 'Freedomland' location, and so on. Sure, you can watch this film and make sense of it. It's not unwatchable, it's just a poorly made film on top of a script rife with poor social commentary. I don't think it's the actors' faults for their shortcomings as characters, it's that the screenwriter couldn't do any better than these one dimensional characters. Even with all of Moore's outlandish acting, she only ever exhibited this sort of nervous panic despite her varying situations. Watch it if you won't, but certainly don't pay to see this.

This is a curious name for what used to be a reform school were children were mistreated .The place plays a minor role in the movie anyway but it adds some mystery to the scenes where people are looking for the disappeared child.The screenplay is terribly derivative ,and only the two actors 'performance make it a passably watchable work.Particularly Julianne Moore,an extremely ambitious actress who shines when she is given decent material to work with ("the hours" "far from heaven").Her performance as a confused distraught mum is really impressive; Samuel L .Jackson's character avoids the clichés: he is not really a superhero,his son is not the brilliant kid at the university,and we are spared the usual divorce from a wife who's sick and tired of waiting for an always absent cop.The big problem of the movie is that the writers could not (or would not) properly connect the two stories (the mother ,her child and her friends is one thing,the black community is another one ,the latter serving as a very vague and thin background ).

This movie was a crock from the start. The writer Price is some white liberal who anointed himself as an interpreter of inner city blacks to us ignorant white yahoos. His previous venture was the better "Clockers", which was made into a lame movie by Spike Lee. In a country where the two latest racial flaps were a black whore falsely accusing 3 frat boys of rape and that case dragged on for a year in spite of the fact EVERY shred of evidence pointed to their innocence and the woman changed her story with the weather. Don't forget how every white academic liberal and their black studies cohort spewed venom on the students based on the old ante-bellum "slaves being raped by massa" myth, which goes against reality where there are 112 black on white rapes for every case of the reverse. Or the Jena 6 case where six violent black youths beat a white kid silly. But since some nooses were hung months earlier, which had nothing to do with either race or the kid they beat, the black power movement and the white liberal drones descended on Jena to exonerate the punks and excoriate the town. But, in their defense, I do add that attempted murder was too steep a charge, but those Jena 6 punks belong in jail, not addressing the NAACP or appearing on BET.Back to the movie, this wigged out white mother, Julianne Moore, claimed she was carjacked and her kid was taken from her, and this happened in the projects. She is no racist, as a matter of fact she works in the same project in the day care center, along with her son who is in the class. So naturally everyone goes haywire trying to find the kid. There are shades of the 1994 Susan Smith case, the murdering Southern mom who killed her kids then tried to blame it on a black man. But, as I remember, the police never bought her story and never shut down a project either. Her brother is a white cop in the neighboring working class suburb. Natch, he's a racist and angry as heck. Yet even he thinks his sister is a loser who is hiding something. So the suburban cops buffalo themselves into the city and shut down the project This is the first bit of unreality. As if the city and the mayor are going to put up with this. As if ten thousand lawyers, civil rights protesters, Sharpton rabble rousers and Nation of Islam thugs wouldn't descend on this city in a matter of hours; this in the middle of New Jersey not the Sudan, in 1999, not 1949. That alone makes most of the other racial drama superfluous. Then there is the other persistent whine about "Our black kids go missing and you do nothing, but when a white kid goes missing....", like the black on black crime whine(as if black on white crime is acceptable), this falls on deaf ears to me since it is the criminal street code of silence and the horrid conditions of black inner city "families" that hinder solving and creates the conditions for those crimes and tragedies.The movie quickly devolves into an almost father - daughter relation between Detective Council, Sam Jackson, and the distraught mother Brenda Martin, played by Julianne Moore. Credit must be given to Ms. Moore for her thankless performance of a really messed up woman, as well as to Edie Falco, who played a woman who finds lost children and helps crack the case. Samuel Jackson played the requisite strong black guy who sets all the racist whites, as well as his brood in the projects, straight. He even had a chance to quell the requisite racial confrontation in the end by telling everyone the case was solved, but that would have been too simple. I wonder if all those black cops in New Orleans, the ones who looted and abandoned their posts during the flood or committed violent crimes on the side should invite him in as a role model? He even has a nice working class white guy cop sidekick, William Forsythe, just to make us trailer trash feel a little better about themselves, "Find a strong black man to teach you and you can be enlightened as I am", is what the writer seems to be saying through him. As a missing child case, this might had made a good Lifetime movie. But with the hyped up, dishonestly created racial tension as the theme, it is an exercise in affirmative action film-making designed to elicit outrage when none was called for.