Product: Frequency (2000)
Rating: 4.0
THE ULTIMATE FATHER-SON REUNION...HEARTWARMING FANTASY FILM
This is a wonderfully nuanced fantasy flick with a bravura performance by Dennis Quaid who plays the father and a compelling one by Jim Caviezel who plays the son.Another reviewer hit the nail on the head when he claimed this film to be reminiscent of a Twilight Zone episode. It certainly has that feel to it. The premise here is a simple one. A son, haunted by the premature, though heroic, death of his fire fighter father thirty years earlier, is reunited with him through an old ham radio which had belonged to his father. He finds himself speaking to his father over the air waves, when an aurora borealis-like solar storm provides a conduit into the past.This connection to the past allows the son to alter the one event which has so profoundly marred his life, that of his father's death. Over the airwaves he tells his father of the fire to which he will be dispatched and of his impending death. He also tells his father what he needs to do in order to avoid his premature demise. The father is dispatched to the fire about which his son has told him and acts upon his son's suggestion, forever altering the future.This change, however, alters other events, and it results in his mother's premature death at the hands of a serial killer. Father and son now go to work in tandem, each in his own time and way, to try to alter this event, forever changing their respective lives. The son, who is a cop, finds that the case which he has been working on is now the unsolved serial killer case involving his mother.As the father effects subtle changes in his respective reality, this causes shifts in his son's present day reality. While this may seem a little confusing, it is to be expected when you are dealing with time shifts and the ramificatins of altering past events through future information. Ultimately, this causes an interesting convergence of the past upon the present.A nice touch to this film is the fact that it takes place in Queens, New York, home of the New York Mets, and both father and son are die hard Mets fans. More specifically, the father's death occurs in 1969, the year in which the New York Mets won the World Series. This will turn out to be a pivotal event in the movie for more reasons than the obvious one. Baseball fans and nostalgia buffs will love its inclusion in the film.This is a wonderful movie which is sure to both fascinate and tug at your heart strings.