Set in the late 1970s, Christina is a single mother from Ohio who escapes her abusive partner, along with her two daughters; teenaged MJ and seven-year-old Shell. She moves to the Florida coast where she meets up with a friend who gets her a job in drug smuggling. But Christina must meet the challenges of protecting and providing for her children, with her oldest daughter being more defiant and the hazards of her occupation.
For directing Free Ride, the inaugural Tangerine Entertainment Juice Award was given to Shana Betz at the 2013 Hamptons InternationalFilm Festival.
Critical response
Free Ride has received negative reviews. Film review aggregatorRotten Tomatoes reports that 14% of critics gave the film a positive review based on 7 reviews, with an average score of 3.9/10. On Metacritic, which assigns a rating out of 100 based on reviews from critics, the film has a score of 41 based on 9 reviews, considered to be "mixed or average". Writing for The Hollywood Reporter, John DeFore said the film was " loving portrait of a mother many would say deserves a much more critical eye". Stephen Holden of The New York Times writes that "rom top to bottom, feels authentic, and its laid-back, nonjudgmental tone evokes the easygoing world of Jimmy Buffett songs celebrating how changes in latitude bring changes in attitude. Much of the movie seems bathed in the pink-grapefruit haze of a Florida sunset. Free Ride offers an unsettling vision of a demimonde whose inhabitants live with the reality that there may be no tomorrow." Diego Costa of Slant Magazine gave the film two out of four stars, and commented that "Paquin's believable performance keeps the all-too-neat narrative from completely surrendering to cheesy melodrama, and Betz's script is refreshingly devoid of embellishment or poetic ambition. But the filmmaker's too-insistent refusal to commit to the melodramatic or to the suspenseful only makes Free Ride seem like empty dramatization in the end." Elizabeth Weitzman of New YorkDaily News gave the film two out of five stars, commenting that Betz was "unable to do the story justice as either a writer or director. While this true-life odyssey should be the basis for a compelling drama or even a taut thriller, slack direction and a weak screenplay undermine the plot’s inherent tension." Weitzman thought Paquin was miscast and "never settles into the role."
