Last night, I watched a movie that I had not seen for a while. Frequency, starring Dennis Quaid and James Caviezel. This movie was released in theaters in the year 2000 and it is hands down one of the best Father-Son movies ever made. This review contains some minor spoilers for the movie.
Frank Sullivan (Quaid) is a firefighter during the late 60s. In 1969, he goes in to rescue a run away in a burning warehouse and is killed when the fire ended up being worse than expected. This leaves his son, John (Caviezel) to grow up without his dad. One evening in 1999, after the son grows up and becomes a detective, he hooks up his dad’s old HAM radio. Through some atmospheric phenomenon, Frank from 1969 gets in contact with John from 1999. When John figures out what is happening, he warns his father that he is going to die in a fire the next day and tells him how to get out of the warehouse alive.
In the original version of what happened in 1969, John’s mother was called away from her nursing duties because of the death of her husband. Because she wasn’t there, a man was given the wrong medication and died. Since her husband survived and she wasn’t pulled away, she saved the life of the man getting the wrong medication. Unfortunately, the man she saved was a serial killer known as the Nightingale. He murdered three nurses before this night and since he survived he went on to murder 7 more, including John’s mother. The rest of the movie is father and son working via the HAM radio to solve a 30 year old cold case.
This movie is great and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I watched this whole movie and all I could think is I would give anything for the chance to experience something like this with my dad, even in as crazy as the whole movie was. It is really a story about a dad and his son working together and learning the value of listening to each other. There is a sub plot in the movie dealing with baseball. Fathers, sons, and baseball, all they would have had to do is throw in an apple pie and this would have been more Americana than we have seen in years.
The film is rated PG-13, there are some intense fight scenes as well as a few murders that take place off screen.
I loved this movie and if you want something awesome to watch with your Dad, this is the movie for you.