Melodrama trumps drama in 'Freedomland'

None of those women compares to Brenda Martin, the violently bereaved mother Moore plays in ''Freedomland," an overblown urban crime drama that should be a lot better than it is. Brenda is Moore's most hysterical basket case so far, a single mom who starts a race riot after she tells a detective (Samuel L. Jackson) that a young black male carjacked her in a housing project in Dempsey, a fictitious, predominately black North Jersey township.

Brenda, of course, is from Gannon, the neighboring white, working-class town. And it's not just that she's been assaulted and her car stolen. Her assailant has driven off with her 4-year-old son, Cody, in the back seat. News of the abducted boy provokes the police to seal off Dempsey's Armstrong projects, effectively imprisoning its black and Latino tenants until Cody turns up.

Everyone in Armstrong knows Jackson's detective, Lorenzo Council. They call him Big Daddy, and typically when something goes wrong in this five-building complex, its residents turn to him. Now he's in the unfortunate position of having to shepherd Brenda around as the locked-down Armstrong residents seethe: How dare he coddle this white woman while our civil rights are being violated! Brenda happens to have volunteered in a school program in Armstrong, but that turns moot under the circumstances.

Over the course of two days, Brenda and Lorenzo, helped by scores of other people, search for the kid. And over and over, the authenticity of her story is challenged. What is this creepy, histrionic lady not telling us? Through it all, Moore seems hopped up on sorrow, as if she'd been snorting from mounds of woe.

But then, everybody in ''Freedomland" is unhinged. Ron Eldard shows up as Brenda's overheated brother, a Gannon cop whose only function is to yell at and beat up black suspects. In turn, the black suspects, along with the suspects' outraged families (namely the mother and sister of a guy named Rafik), scream and curse back at whomever. The black extras seem to have been instructed just to wave their arms, shake their fists, and roll their necks to simulate outrage. If ever there were a moment for Jackson to revisit his peacekeeping DJ from ''Do the Right Thing," this is it: ''Whoa! Y'all take a chill!"