Eventually is taken away by a doctor who explains she has a gift and helps her train it. Of course it turns out his motivations aren't completely honest and Freya is expected to help out the NSA. After some resistance she agrees and with the help of NSA agent Brendan Dean, played by Joe Flannigan (from Stargate Atlantis), she stops an assassin, re-unites with her sister and the film ends happily ever after.
As might be event by the my synopsis one of the first issues I noticed with this film is its terrible pacing, what visually just felt wrong, like the editor was evenly spacing the scenes and the time we spent there. Things seemed to happen at a rolling, leisurely pace, and though the set-up and training was interesting, I felt like it could've been summed up in a much shorter space of time. Meanwhile, Brendan Dean, the agent she works with and who is obviously meant to be an important character, doesn't turn up for ages - in fact I am suspicious his introduction doesn't happen until the middle of the film.
On top of this, I realised that the writer had failed to give our main character any personal stakes in the main plot line. True, her sister is threatened at the end of the film, but that's more down to bad timing than anything. Otherwise there's no reason for her to care about an assassin killing someone - other than being a good person and perhaps feeling sorry for the poor guy she meets who got caught in his last attack.
This brings me to the third problem, Freya has no character arc, and no character development. That's something you can't get away with generally with a main character in films. Films primary follow characters not just on external journeys, like going to Mordor, but in internal journeys. Freya does not learn anything, she does not change. True, she perhaps gains confidence in her abilities and self, after being locked away in a hospital - but there's nothing to really to gauge against that. At the beginning of the film she has no goals or desires,other than going to prom. The only thing she loses when she's put away is her family, and that how close she is to them is never really demonstrated. Her father dies, but we never meet him, and she only talks about him once. On top of that, she basically has no obstacles to overcome either - she has no flaws and she learns to control her power quite easily once teamed with the doctor. There is basically nothing really stopping her gaining her goal. If she had a goal.
I could go on, but I personally think its obvious that the script needed a serious rewrite, as its managed to avoid a rather vital component - a main character we can invest in. I was much more interested in Joe Flannigan's character, and not just because I enjoy watching the Stargate actor, but because it was slightly more developed. The Brendan Dean character at least had job worries and opinions about the NSA and his colleagues. Freya was just bland. She reacted in the basic way most characters do react when gaining a superpower and not much more.
Despite all this though, Thoughtcrimes does have a neat concept, and the latter half of the film with Brendan Dean and Freya cracking the case is actually good fun to watch. The way she uses her powers is brilliant, she doesn't just read minds, she can see what others picture in their mind's eye, can see what they're going to do next.
In this respect, I think the basic concept itself would have made, and could still make, a great television series, a cop buddy sci-fi crime show with the goofy male cop and the telepathic female, and in some respects the film did feel like a clunky written television pilot.
In summary
Thoughtcrimes is a neat concept,that if you had the right actors and writers could make a good television series. As a film though it fails in several departments: the protagonist is bland, there are no great stakes, the pacing feels off and I didn't even mention the music that never seemed quite right - I'm afraid choral does not work in chase scenes unless its Gold Murray doing it.
