EH, JOE?

REVIEWED - FREEDOMLAND: HERE is a singular, yet unlovely, oddity. Freedomland, which is based on a novel by Richard Price, has an interesting idea at its heart. It features some very impressive actors (albeit in the wrong roles). It clearly has had some money thrown at it. It's quite nicely shot. And so on.

But the project has been sabotaged by some of the most eccentric direction you will encounter outside the world of performance art. Indeed, the film fails in such extreme and, to be fair, interesting fashion, you could be forgiven for mistakenly viewing it as an experimental piece.

Let's dismantle a classically shaped crime thriller and randomly slap the bits back together to form an odd, avant-garde meta-structure. Let's cast Julianne Moore, an increasingly regal 45 years old, as a young welfare mother with a history of substance abuse. Let's have Edie Falco pop up in an irrelevant role and deliver an absurdly melodramatic 10-minute speech in a single take. Let's give Samuel L Jackson silly collapsible spectacles. Let's go and see something else instead.

For the record, Freedomland concerns the attempts of Detective Jackson to locate Moore's missing daughter. The child was, it seems, abducted in a carjacking near a largely African-American housing project in New Jersey. The police department's insensitive and overzealous reaction to the alleged crime - which contrasts markedly with their lethargy when responding to offences involving black victims - rapidly leads to disorder and rioting.

Joe Roth, a powerful producer whose credits as director include such atrocities as Christmas with the Kranks and America's Sweethearts, demonstrates his unconventional approach to film-making during one of the first scenes between Moore and Jackson. While the detective questions his charge, Roth bounces the camera round the room like a super-ball, before ordering his editor to cut the sequence as if it were a video for a speed-metal band.

There may be some reason why, later on, in scenes featuring much greater drama, he dispenses with editing altogether and allows the camera to roll until it runs out of film. If so, they never become apparent. Baffling from weird beginning to messy end.