Not something you havnt seen before, but a good movie.

It's very true that the actor's performances in freedomland are the only really good things. Julianne Moore gives a skilled, moving performance as a mother distraught after the abduction of her son. I loved her performance as the mentally shut down, emotionally distraught mom, Moore is so great at playing mentally unstable characters, really nails the character of Brenda. Samuel L. Jackson is pretty good as the officer handling Brenda's case, he is believable as a police officer and he and Moore has nice on screen chemistry. Usually I'm not a huge fan of Jackson just because I don't really care for the way he usually plays characters, kind of with a very smart *** attitude, but he wasn't that in this film. The script is average, it doesn't support the movie to the caliber that it should, which is why I stated that the performances are the good things in the movie. The performances make the movie a whole lot better than it would be without powerful talented performances. This movie would receive a 2 with bad acting. The writing struggles at many points, which leaves it up to the actors to save it some how. And sometimes they do. But sometimes they just can't. And that's why I'm gonna have to give Freedomland a 5 out of 10.

Bloodied Brenda Martin (Julianne Moore) arrives at the emergency room claiming to be a victim of a carjacking in the black neighborhood. Police detective Lorenzo Council (Samuel L. Jackson) is assigned the case and she reveals that her son is still in the car. Brenda's brother Danny (Ron Eldard) is a cop from a neighboring town and the outside police force descends on the black town. Soon Lorenzo starts questioning Brenda's story. He recruits Karen Collucci (Edie Falco) and her volunteer group to search for the boy.This tries to be a thriller while tackling some very sensitive racial issues. The problem is that it handles it with no subtlety. It hits the issue with a sledgehammer. There is a good crime mystery here but it gets overwhelmed. It seems like everybody is yelling and nobody is listening. It may be better to introduce Edie Falco earlier in the movie rather than halfway through. It's a frustrating film to watch.

Freedomland is a serious film, with serious messages.(The current score on this site is far too low). One could easily imagine it as a project of Spike Lee at his most socially conscious, and whose film Do The Right Thing (1989) some of this resembles. Joe Roth, the director of the present title, has a less prestigious CV than Lee (Roth's last movie was Christmas With The Kranks), but makes surprisingly good work of bringing Richard Price's novel to the screen - even if the sum is less than its parts. Price's previous, respected, work for the screen includes screenplays for Clockers and Shaft. With his own adaptation of Freedomland, he was faced with bringing to audiences a story with two distinct threads: that of a kidnapping as well as imminent social unrest. The fault-line between the two, although necessarily related in the narrative, would always be a difficult one to mend and some of the weaknesses in the final film can be put down to uncertainties in bridging that gap.Uncertainties existed too in the studio's marketing of the film which, in the words of one observer here, made it out to be a 'thriller/ action movie with some paranormal slant.' The fact that Freedomland never quite makes it mind up what it is (although the paranormal makes no appearance) as well as the studio's own confusions, explain maybe why it has failed to make a strong impact on the public since release.This underrating is a pity as there's much to admire in a movie, which sees Samuel L. Jackson on good form as a cop torn between conscience and community while, casting misapprehensions apart, Julianne Moore has a good go as the mother of a missing child. The scenes between the two, or between Brenda and the child-searching organisation 'Friends of Kent', are the best in the movie. One or two - as when the truth of matters is teased out of the shell-shocked mother outside Freedomland, or Moore's monologue during police questioning - are outstanding, The trouble is that when the story broadens out from this central relationship it becomes more diffuse. It's frankly less believable, partly due to some stereotyping amongst the blacks and the cops. Council has his work cut out finding a missing child, defusing local tensions as well as facing some personal issues of his own. But when civil upheaval ensues and he finally offers the troubled Brenda his apparently hard-won advice (something about God always giving parents a second chance with their children) nothing is as memorable as it ought to be. No less convincing is her sudden kiss of the policeman, suggesting a depth of emotion un-guessed at, both by him and the audience.Outside of Brenda and Lorenzo's increasingly fraught relationship as investigator and victim the film suffers from a degree of self-importance. In an interview titled Writing Freedomland included on the disc, Price talks about the inspiration behind his book - that of the real life Susan Price, who also claimed her child had been abducted by a black man. He goes on to term racism as "the American flu - everyone's got it." This may well be the case, but Freedomland offers little new in its portrayal, right down to the moment a provocative riot cop pushes an urban youth over the line into violence to start a riot.In short this is well worth a look, although I would advise a rental over any full price purchase until seen.