There are two good yarns in Frequency. Unfortunately, they belong to different movies.
Story One is about how young, depressed NYPD cop Jim Caviezel in 1999 finds an old ham radio in his dead firefighter dad's trunk that allows the pair of them to talk across the time-slip and lets the son tip the father off to the right exit door on the night of the 1969 warehouse fire that claimed his life. Neat and touching.
The other tale, unfortunately, is so convoluted I could hardly follow it: which means I shall spoil no one's surprise if I simply say that the knock-on effect of saving his dad's life puts his mother's in jeopardy from a serial killer. In short, the film paints itself into a banal crime-corner and by the time you've figured out how it's escaping from it - by one mighty time leap into the dimension of absurdity - the benign feelings induced by the first story have worn off. All the sadder, since director Gregory (Primal Fear) Hoblit and debutant screenwriter Toby Emmerich manage such a clever parallelling of events that are 30 years and a generation apart. They play on the universal sadness of sudden and sometimes tragic parting with loved ones, which we all feel, as well as the "if only ..." hankering we all have as we retrospectively view our mistakes.
If only they'd looked at the finished movie and seen the errors of being too clever by half, Frequency might have been a small time-travelling classic. As it stands, it's still points ahead of the usual SF mishmash.
Frequency
Cert: cert12
