People love serial killer thrillers, time travel movies, and science fiction, so it’s curious that the combination of all three in 2000’s Frequency didn’t fare anywhere near as well at the box office as you’d expect despite its individually popular parts.
Gregory Hoblit’s high concept genre film wasn’t a bomb, but a haul of $68 million on a $31 million budget made it far from an unqualified smash hit. Reviews were and remain solid to this day, though, with the generational murder mystery boasting respective Rotten Tomatoes scores of 70 and 81 percent from critics and audiences.
More than 20 years on, and it’s changed the course of history by embarking on a journey towards streaming salvation, with FlixPatrol revealing the severely underrated and unfairly forgotten Frequency as one of the most-watched features on the iTunes worldwide watch-list over the weekend.
Jim Caviezel and Dennis Quaid star as a father and son separated by 30 years, with the former able to speak to his old man in the past via an old radio. Naturally, he warns the latter about his impending death, which sets off a chain reaction that ripples across the decades, forcing the family split apart by time to work together in an effort to prevent the same murderer from committing an entirely different set of atrocities.
It’s heady stuff, but strong performances across the board from the ensemble cast and a solid handle on the mechanics of its own plot devices make Frequency a unique entry into each genre that it falls, even if it’s a shame more people aren’t singing its praises.
