I’ve loved time travel movies for as long as I can remember, especially when the paradoxes are either neatly tied up or effectively used to blind you to the plotholes inherent to the genre, and Frequency is not exception, with a little quirky cheese thrown in for character.

Dennis Quaid and Jim Caviezel are possibly the greatest onscreen father-son performance ever. Even though they only actually appear onscreen together for a few minutes towards the end, it’s clear they worked together to make it really seem they were related. The voice, mannerisms, stuff, it just all goes to selling the idea that Caviezel is the little boy we’re seeing in the 1960s sequences.

This movie has a moment in it that movies so rarely have that I’d almost forgotten about this great thing that cinema can do. It’s only really possible in high-concept movies like this. It’s the moment where you’ve been happily following the movie for about half an hour, forty-five minutes or so, it’s predictable but only because you saw the trailer, and it’s not a bad thing, in fact it’s a lot of fun but then BANG, something happens and you think, “Holy crap! But there’s like, half the movie or more still left … what the hell are they going to do now????”

Frequency takes all the paths available to its story – the writer must’ve really enjoyed writing himself into corners. Some will complain about the ending – really, it’s extraordinarily cheesy, you’re warned – personally, I kind of loved it, mainly because of the wonderful double act of Quaid and Caviezel throughout the movie, they’re just so classically father-son-ish, it works.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 27th, 2004 at 9:02 am in Movie Reviews, unrated. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.