FREQUENCY (New Line) Starring: Dennis Quaid, Jim Caviezel, Shawn Doyle, Elizabeth Mitchell, Andre Braugher, Noah Emmerich. Screenplay: Toby Emmerich. Producers: Bill Carraro & Toby Emmerich and Hawk Koch & Gregory Hoblit. Director: Gregory Hoblit. MPAA Rating: PG-13 (adult themes, violence, profanity) Running Time: 118 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Just when I thought I'd seen every possible spin on the serial killer thriller, here comes FREQUENCY to show that there is something new under the sun. The serial killer story in this case is wrapped up in a fantasy story about a troubled cop named John Sullivan (Jim Caviezel), whose entire life has been affected by the death of his firefighter dad Frank (Dennis Quaid) 30 years earlier. But strange atmospheric phenomena are afoot, and when John pulls out his dad's old ham radio, he manages to pull in none other than dad himself, chatting from 30 years in the past. John sees this as an opportunity not just to get to know Frank, but to save his life with his foreknowledge as well. Unfortunately, one piece of changed history has a domino effect on other events, including the death of John's mother Julia (Elizabeth Mitchell) at the hands of -- that's right -- a serial killer.
Time-travel tales are inevitably head-scratching affairs if you ponder them for too long, and FREQUENCY is no exception. It posits a strange side effect of the father-son communication -- when John successfully prevents Frank from dying as he had in _his_ past, he is left the only one who remembers a world in which Frank died in 1969, though he also finds himself newly-flooded with memories of 30 years of life with dad. It's an utterly preposterous conceit, of course, but it actually works. Caviezel never once smirks at the material, resulting in a performance full of convincingly pent-up emotion. Director Gregory Hoblit's staging of John's new montage of memory is surprisingly affecting; Caviezel's work as a man re-discovering his father is better than you have any reason to expect in a genre film.
Now, did I mention that this all turns into a serial killer thriller at some point? Yes, it is soon discovered that saving Frank's life has set in motion events that will cost Julia hers. Father and son team up across time to send Frank on a search for the rogue cop (Shawn Doyle) responsible for a series of murders. Hoblit and screenwriter Toby Emmerich might have chosen to explore the ramifications of continuing to mess with history, but that would be a bit too philosophically deep. They're content to set up a series of neat sequences that show the instantaneous impact of one decision 30 years earlier on the world of the present. FREQUENCY is a genuinely snappy piece of film-making, far and away the liveliest work from Hoblit (who got bogged down in the grim subject matter of PRIMAL FEAR and FALLEN), even when you're inspired to a round of "yeah, right."
There's no question that much of FREQUENCY is smart and entertaining, but it's also a fragmented piece of work. For the first half of the film, it's a fantasy with a strong human side, anchored by an unconventional but convincing father-son relationship. In the second hour, it shifts dramatically to a creep-show, with the sinister killer popping up at terribly inconvenient times. That makes for some crowd-pleasing chases and struggles, but a terribly rote plot progression. Though there are still some well-crafted scenes -- Andre Braugher gets a particularly good one as a cop friend of Frank's watching a World Series prediction come true -- character ceases to matter for all practical purposes.
It suddenly matters again in FREQUENCY's achingly sentimental denouement, which gets all FIELD OF DREAMS on us by tying father-son connections to baseball. The strange thing is that it probably wouldn't have felt nearly as overwrought if FREQUENCY had stuck with the tone of its first half. The shift from character piece to thriller is jarring enough; the attempt to shift back to character piece feels like an unearned piece of manipulation. It's easy to recommend FREQUENCY for the things it does right in each of its incarnations, but the recommendation can't be too enthusiastic when those incarnations are so incongruous. I think there's a reason we've never seen this sort of serial killer thriller before: It's awfully hard to make a serial killer thriller a tear-jerker as well.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 radio waves: 6.
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