A star-studded thriller that tried and failed to be all things at once dishes out tough justice on Netflix

Biting off more than you can chew might have descended into cliche a long time ago, but there’s a reason why; it’s a phrase that applies to every single aspect of our existence. Extending to cinema, there’s been a large number of movies attempting to stuff a handful of genres into a single story to try and be all things to all people, but the reception to 2006’s Freedomland reiterates why the results are often lacking.

Director Joe Roth tries to incorporate strands of mystery thriller, police procedural, intimate drama, social parable, media intrusion, and an examination of racial tensions all at once, only for a 23 percent Rotten Tomatoes score and 25 percent user rating to put an exclamation point on how badly it missed the mark on all fronts. In fact, the aggregation site even describes Freedomland as “poorly directed and overacted” in its summary. Ouch.

A cast featuring Samuel L. Jackson, Julianne Moore, Edie Falco, Aunjanue Ellis, Clarke Peters, Anthony Mackie, and others couldn’t elevate the material above the cloying and on-the-nose, a crying shame when there was plenty of rich subtext to mine for tension, heartbreak, and pathos.

The story finds a grieving mother blaming a Black man for the disappearance of her son following a carjacking, with Jackson’s detective getting steadily more skeptical and suspicious as he digs deeper into the case. Freedomland failed to even reach $15 million at the box office, but it has at least gained some new notoriety on Netflix.

As per FlixPatrol, the widely-derided attempt at a hot-button prestige picture has made some noise on the platform’s most-watched charts, even if it’s a disappointing experience all-round.