Davis P 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.

sandx Once again, Julianne Moore,has shown us what a superb actress she is. Her performance as the mother of the missing child is a 'tour de force'. She expresses all the anguish and confusion of that character and had me believing I was watching real life. As usual Samuel L Jackson was Samuel L Jackson, which he does brilliantly. I can't remember a bad performance from him. I gave this film 8 and might have been a tad more generous but for the sub-plot, which I found invasive and unnecessary.Quite why the director found it good to drag us away from the unfolding drama to another conflict left me baffled. However ,plaudits for the brilliant Miss Moore .

Tss5078 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.

FilmFlaneur 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.