Frequency

Some films should be chopped up into guitar picks. A more appropriate fate for Frequency would be to get re-edited into a series of commercials. It wouldn't take much. Both pretentious and barbarically dopy, the film is a worshipful display of a few things that mean America: a Mets T-shirt, a Coke bottle, a pack of Doublemint gum, a series of nurse killings. The premise is that in 1969, NYC fireman Dennis Quaid contacts his son (Jim Caviezel) 30 years in the future by ham radio. The son tips off his father on how to avoid his death in a burning warehouse, but their meddling with fate accidentally prolongs a serial killer's reign of terror. Now dad and son must keep rewriting history in order to keep mom (Elizabeth Mitchell) from falling victim to the killer.

So solemn is director Gregory Hoblit in pursuing to its limit the fantasy of restoring the nuclear family that he misses every opportunity to make a real movie. Quaid and Caviezel take the incredible in stride; the film gets in none of the sense of discovery and adventure that might have made the time-tunnel concept fun. Calling the infantile Americana of Frequency sub-Capra would be an insult to Penny Marshall. At the Apple Valley, Harbour Mall, Holiday, Showcase, Tri-Boro, and Woonsocket cinemas.
-- Chris Fujiwara