CONFLICT, BUT NO RESOLUTION, IN PROVOCATIVE 'FREEDOMLAND'.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

A YOUNG BOY goes missing and all hell breaks loose in ``Freedomland,'' a movie with a lot on its mind and too much on its plate.

It's a well-intentioned effort that's hard to like. Acclaimed author Richard Price (``Clockers'') wrote the screenplay based on his 1998 novel. In both forms, he exhibits great command of the piece's themes - racial and economic discrimination, how lost children are tracked down, the fragility of addictive personalities even after recovery. The movie, though, feels overacted and artificially jacked-up, most uncomfortably when it tries to lighten a multipronged urban nightmare with pseudo-spiritual expressions of hope.

The acting is, as you'd expect, intense. Julianne Moore stays in edge- of-breakdown mode as Brenda Martin. A former junkie from the white working-class New Jersey town of Gannon, Brenda has found some direction from her job at a child-care center in the projects of adjacent, mostly African-American Dempsy. One night, though, she staggers into a hospital with bloodied hands and a story about her car getting jacked by a black man. Her 4-year-old, Cody, was asleep in the back seat, the single mother adds.

Dempsy detective Lorenzo Council (Samuel L. Jackson, sporting a porkpie hat) takes Brenda's testimony. He quickly smells a rat, but he also sympathizes with the emotionally fragile woman. Although he's considered something of a trouble-shooting superman in the projects - the residents call him Big Daddy and appreciate the respectful way in which he sometimes arrests their sons - Lorenzo has his weaknesses. His own teenager is locked up, and, when he gets too flustered, the confident cop suffers debilitating asthma attacks.

He'd better keep that inhaler handy through the Brenda affair. Her hotheaded brother Danny (Ron Eldard) is a Gannon cop, and - jurisdiction be damned - his department eagerly lays siege to the Dempsy project until their guy's nephew is found. Meanwhile, Lorenzo gets help in the frustratingly delicate task of trying to get the full truth out of Brenda from the Friends of Kent, a group of volunteer missing-child searchers led by the forthright, no-nonsense Karen Collucci (``The Sopranos' '' Edie Falco). But will Lorenzo be able to crack the case before a full-blown race riot erupts?

Director Joe Roth, who is better-known for running studios and production companies than helming serious movies (his last directing effort was ``Christmas With the Kranks''), does commendable presentation work here. He knows when scenes should be all quick, close shots, how to build simmering potential violence, and when to just ease back and let the actors talk. Unfortunately, some of the things they say, such as Karen's bitterly controlled rants and Lorenzo's flights of cosmic cop philosophy, stop the proceedings dead without doing much to illuminate the issues they address.

And, as noted, little here alleviates ``Freedomland's'' overriding, oppressive grimness. It's not the kind of movie you expect to leave with an up feeling. However, we should come out of it more excited, outraged, intrigued or, perhaps, genuinely saddened by life's rotten realities than we do. That's the difference between the effect of melodrama and something closer to the real bone.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

FREEDOMLAND - Two and one half stars

(R: violence, racism, language, children in jeopardy)

Starring: Samuel L. Jackson, Julianne Moore, Edie Falco, Ron Eldard.

Director: Joe Roth.

Running time: 1 hr. 53 min.

Playing: In wide release.

In a nutshell: A missing-child case triggers racial conflict in this very melodramatic and mostly unpleasant police procedural.