Frequency: Movie Review, DVD Review (2000)

Directed by Gregory Hoblit, written by Toby Emmerich, 117 minutes, rated PG-13.

(Originally published 2000)

Those interested in seeing Gregory Hoblit’s “Frequency” have a decision to make, one that’s going to make or break their experience of seeing the film. They have to decide whether they can suspend disbelief for two hours in a film that demands, above all, that they open their minds to one of the year’s more preposterous plots.

In the film, a 36-year-old New York cop in 1999 talks to his firefighter father in 1969. They do this with the help of a shortwave radio, some mystical northern lights that wrap around rooftop antennas and some spectacular sun flares, all of which somehow bend time to bring the two men back together again.

That’s right--back together. You see, 30 years ago, the father, Frank Sullivan (Dennis Quaid), died while battling a fire, leaving his son, John (James Caviezel), to be raised by his mother, Julia (Elizabeth Mitchell). Since John now owns and lives in his childhood home, the two men are essentially communicating in the same space with the same ham radio, the only division between them being death and time.

Naturally, the film uses its unique reunion for all it’s worth, wrenching genuine emotion from a conversation most would love to have with a departed loved one. It either takes great skill to pull something as shaky as this off, or a whole lot of chutzpah. Hoblit opts for chutzpah.

He hauls in serial killers and gunfights, people dropping dead and then springing miraculously back to life. He knows the laws of movie time travel and follows them closely in a film that suggests if you tinker with something in the past, it will forever change the present.

How John Sullivan’s present is changed won’t be explored here, but in spite of some glitches, and one of the more painfully sentimental and unforgivable endings going, it’s mostly an engrossing trip.

Grade: B