Movies I've Missed (Until Now): Frequency

This movie is ten years old, so I think it falls into the Movies I’ve Missed category. For those of you who haven’t seen it, Dennis Quaid and Jim Caveziel play father and son (Quaid a New York City firefighter in 1969, Caveziel a homicide cop in 1999) who wind up talking to each other on the same ham radio thirty years apart. They’re able to do that because of something about solar flares and the Aurora Borealis (don’t bother trying to figure it out, just accept the gimmick and move on). Caveziel’s character, who knows that his father died fighting a fire in 1969, seizes the opportunity to change the past and save his dad’s life.


Of course, things don’t work out like he intended, because as anybody who’s ever read any science fiction knows, when you change even one thing in the past it has a ripple effect and a lot of other things get changed, too. In this case, people die who weren’t supposed to and lives get ruined. Father and son wind up having to work together to solve a thirty-year-old mystery and catch a serial killer.


There are a lot of twists in this plot, which, while not completely unexpected, work very effectively. It’s a well-written film, nailing down all the loose ends I could see, and well-acted, too, which helps to generate considerable suspense in some scenes, especially toward the end. I liked this one a lot, and if you haven’t seen it, it’s certainly worth watching.