Don't Touch That Dial! By Michael O'Sullivan Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, April 28, 2000

In "Frequency," Jim Caviezel plays John Sullivan, a cop able to speak to his dead father (Dennis Quaid) through a ham radio. (New Line)

Oh, and I suppose dilithium crystals make total sense?

"Frequency," a taut and absorbing supernatural/sci-fi/thriller from director Gregory Hoblit ("Primal Fear" and "Fallen") and first-time screenwriter Toby Emmerich, is no more far-fetched than "Star Trek" ever was, what with all the time-traveling Kirk and company did. It's just that instead of being set on a 23rd-century starship, it takes place in Queens in 1999. Make that 1969 and 1999, since the story hops back and forth between the two periods.

Or rather, under the film's time-bending premise, it's as if the two years were occuring simultaneously, with an audio portal of sorts connecting them in the form of this magic radio. Beneath an October 1999 sky aglow with the eerie shimmner of the northern lights, 36-year-old NYPD cop John Sullivan (Jim Caviezel) suddenly finds himself able to talk to (but not see) his dead father Frank (Dennis Quaid), who's experiencing the same atmospheric disturbance, only back in October 1969. One more thing: When John looks at the calendar, he realizes that the 30th anniversary of his firefighter dad's death in a warehouse conflagration is fast approaching.

Don't tell me you wouldn't try to warn your old man if you could.

So that's just what John does. And after his father overcomes the requisite doubts (Frank is sold by his mysterious radio buddy's ability to predict the outcome of game one of the '69 World Series), he takes steps to save his own life.

Fabulous, right? Except that, according to the laws of movie time travel, if you fiddle with the past, you fiddle with the future. Sure enough, a couple of days later, freaky things start disappearing from John's world – like, for example, his mother (Elizabeth Mitchell). Suddenly she isn't in the picture anymore, quite literally vanishing from family snapshots, and her phone number now belongs to a deli. Down at the precinct, where a recently unearthed corpse has just reopened the investigation of a series of long-unsolved killings, John's workload immediately jumps from three cold case files to 10 – and one of the folders now has his mom's face on it.

It seems that something dad did after escaping the fire has affected mom's fate, and it's now up to John's modern-day forensic skills and Frank's old-fashioned legwork to solve – and then prevent – the 30-year-old crime. It's kind of like "The Bone Collector," only better. Unlike that critical flop, in which frustrated quadriplegic detective Denzel Washington is forced to direct patrolwoman Angelina Jolie's hunt for a serial killer from his sickbed, in this mystery the sleuths aren't even living in the same decade.

What makes "Frequency" work – and it does, beautifully – is partly the film's internal logic. As preposterous as it is, the story sucks you in as inexorably as an undertow. As in "The Sixth Sense" (another movie about talking to dead people, and one with an even more unwieldy gimmick), there's not a single loose nail in the construction. When Frank drops a cigarette on his 1969 desk, a burn miraculously appears on the same desk in 1999 where none was there before. It's as if the past isn't something that's over and done, but something running on a parallel track. If you nudge the other train even a little from your vantage point in the present, you affect the direction of your own ride.

Temporal metaphysics and murder mystery aside, though, what really makes "Frequency" crackle is this: the simple, human drama of a son (so well conveyed by Caviezel) aching for his lost father and a father (so well conveyed by Quaid), yearning to live life long enough to see his little boy grow up.

FREQUENCY (PG-13, 118 minutes) – Contains a couple of bad words, grisly crime-scene photos, gunfire and an exploding fireball.