‘Sound of Freedom’ is a box office hit whose star embraces QAnon

A casual moviegoer might not get why anyone is upset about “Sound of Freedom,” a surprise hit inspired by the real-life exploits of Tim Ballard, a former Department of Homeland Security agent who stages sting operations to catch child sex traffickers.

It’s a fairly standard American action thriller - gritty, violent and hopeful - in which Ballard (Jim Caviezel) fights to save abducted children in the Colombian jungle. The partially crowdfunded film opened this week to a solid review in “Variety,” and vied with the latest Indiana Jones sequel for the top box-office spot on July 4.

But “Sound of Freedom” has been accused by some critics of warping the truth about child exploitation and catering to QAnon conspiracy theorists — something its distributor, Angel Studios, denies. The Guardian’s critic called it a “QAnon-adjacent thriller seducing America.” And the film’s star, Caviezel, has openly embraced the extreme movement, suggesting at media events that a shadowy international cabal is kidnapping children to consume their organs.

1. Is ‘Sound of Freedom’ a true story?

This section contains spoilers for the movie.

“Sound of Freedom” is based on the life of Ballard, who left the Department of Homeland Security about 10 years ago and founded a group that works with local police to catch child sex traffickers in other countries - often by staging elaborate sting operations that it captures on video.

In the film, a brother and sister are lured to an innocuous-sounding photo shoot in Honduras, only to be snatched by abductors and imprisoned in the Colombian jungle. Caviezel’s version of Ballard spends much of the movie sneaking through criminal hideouts to find the children, risking his life and finally beating up the traffickers.

The real Ballard hasn’t claimed to do anything quite like that, but the film ends with a montage of clips from sting operations his group, Operation Underground Railroad, actually conducted in the country. “By the time Tim left Colombia, he and the team had rescued over 120 victims and arrested more than a dozen traffickers,” reads text on the screen.

“I think people are going to be inspired when they watch the story based on Tim’s story,” said Jared Geesey, senior vice president of global distribution for Angel Studios.

Many others have praised Ballard’s work. President Trump appointed him to a State Department advisory council on human trafficking in 2019, which he sat on until it disbanded the next year. Major news organizations covered the 2014 Colombian bust that inspired “Sound of Freedom,” and Ballard testified about the operation before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee.

But Operation Underground Railroad has also been accused of distorting the complex nature of the sex trafficking business, of doing little to help victims despite its dramatic sting videos and even of putting children in danger to make them.

Glenn Kessler, The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, found no evidence for Ballard’s claim that 10,000 children are smuggled into the United States for sex annually — a line that apparently made its way into Trump’s State of the Union address in 2019. In Utah, the Davis County Attorney’s Office spent two and a half years investigating Operation Underground Railroad for alleged communications fraud, witness tampering and retaliation, according to the Deseret News. The investigations ended with no charges in May.

A Vice News investigation in 2020 found no clear falsehoods in Operation Underground Railroad’s rescue claims, but “a pattern of image-burnishing and mythology-building, a series of exaggerations that are, in the aggregate, quite misleading.”

“The entire premise of its operations: that local law enforcement will take over when the dirty work has been done is dangerously naive,” the prominent human trafficking scholar Anne Gallagher wrote for HuffPost in 2015. “Why are police in Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Colombia not arresting child sex traffickers if they are so easy to find? The simplest explanation is law enforcement complicity in such crimes.”

Operation Underground Railroad, which did not respond to a request for comment, says on its website that it works with other organizations to ensure victims get long-term support after its stings. But Foreign Policy reported that a large group of Dominican girls the group rescued in 2014 were on their own again a week later.

2. Star’s link to QAnon

“Sound of Freedom” doesn’t depict anything close to QAnon conspiracy fantasies, which have been linked to many incidents of extremism and violence including the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The film’s villains are common criminals, not the shadowy cabal of occultists imagined by QAnoners.

But the movie has nevertheless been promoted on QAnon message boards, and some accuse it of playing into the movement, which is based on the false belief that a highly organized network of global elites are kidnapping children, having sex with them and harvesting their blood.

That’s partially because Ballard and the actor who plays him, Caviezel, have both expressed support for some of the QAnon’s movement’s wildest claims.

Ballard once entertained a viral theory that claimed the online furniture retailer Wayfair was selling children, sometimes packing them into overpriced storage cabinets. “Law enforcement’s going to flush that out and we’ll get our answers sooner than later,” he said in a July 2020 Twitter video. “But I want to tell you this: children are sold that way.” There is no evidence to support the theory, which has inspired threats against employees and impeded actual child trafficking investigations.

A month after that video, Ballard described conspiracy theorists’ support for his organization as a mixed blessing in an interview with the New York Times. “Some of these theories have allowed people to open their eyes,” he said. “So now it’s our job to flood the space with real information so the facts can be shared.”

Caviezel — who says Ballard recruited him onto the film after seeing him star in” The Count of Monte Cristo” (2002) and Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” (2004) — has espoused even more extreme theories.

The actor appeared at a QAnon convention in Las Vegas in October 2021, giving a speech that quoted Mel Gibson’s final speech in “Braveheart” and included one of QAnon’s main slogans, “The storm is upon us,” which refers to the movement’s fight against the imagined pedophile cabal.

He has focused on one QAnon belief in particular while promoting “Sound of Freedom”: the idea that child traffickers drain children’s blood to harvest a life-giving substance called adrenochrome.

Speaking at a QAnon-affiliated conference in Oklahoma in 2021, the actor said Ballard wanted to join him but “he’s down there saving children as we speak, because they’re pulling kids out of the darkest recesses of hell right now, in . . . all kinds of places, uh, the adrenochroming of children.”

The moderator asked him to elaborate. “If a child knows he’s going to die, his body will secrete this adrenaline,” Caviezel said, his voice catching. “These people that do it, there’ll be no mercy for them. This is one of the best films I’ve ever done in my life. The film is on Academy Award level.”

In reality, adrenochrome is a relatively mundane chemical compound created by oxidizing adrenaline, though the author Hunter S. Thompson portrayed it as a kind of super-drug popular with pedophiles in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”

Geesey, the Angel Studios executive, said anyone who posits that “Sound of Freedom” promotes conspiracy theories hasn’t watched the film.

3. Box office reception

“Sound of Freedom” caused a splash when it opened over the July 4 holiday weekend and went toe-to-toe with one of the biggest franchises in movie history, “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.”

The Indy flick barely edged out “Sound of Freedom” on Independence Day, according to Deadline — $11.7 million to $11.5 million. Angel Studios bragged in a press release that its film was actually the top-grossing film in the country that day, by including another $2.6 million earned through an app that allows people to donate tickets for others.

Either way, it’s a huge showing for a movie that was partially crowdfunded, abandoned by its original producers, and ultimately released by a small studio mostly known for religious projects.

4. Origins and funding

Geesey said the Alejandro Monteverde-directed film was originally produced by 20th Century Studios, but Disney put the project on hold after acquiring the company in 2019, and Angel Studios subsequently adopted it.

The Utah-based production company was launched in 2021 by the Harmon brothers, whose previous projects include a marketing firm that made “adorable ads about disgusting things,” as The Washington Post put it, and VidAngel, a streaming service that lets users censor objectionable material from mainstream movies. (VidAngel’s library shrank after it settled a lawsuit brought by major Hollywood studios).

Using a mix of crowdfunding and partnerships with investors, Angel Studios has previously distributed projects including the small box office success “His Only Son” and “The Chosen,” a streaming series about the life of Christ whose makers claim has been watched hundreds of millions of times.

The studio also produces a comedy show and an animated drama project called “Tuttle Twins,” which features a time-travelling grandma who teaches her grandkids about freedom and economics.

And now - at least briefly - Angel Studios has one of the top movies in the country.

“It definitely exceeded our expectations,” said Geesey, who added that “the message of freedom” clearly resonated with its Independence Day release.

“We thought what better time to really highlight and celebrate the Fourth of July,” he said.