In a recent interview, writer Richard Price acknowledged, "At this point, everybody's like the third detective on 'Law & Order.' " You said it.

		"Freedomland" Rating: R for language, some violent content. Starring: Samuel L. Jackson, Julianne Moore. Director: Joe Roth. "Freedomland" writer Richard Price talks about the process of page to screen "Freedomland" Web site

Toss in years of learning police procedures from "Hill Street Blues," "Cagney & Lacey," "NYPD Blue" and real-life cases dogged by Nancy Grace and the like, and you've got an audience calling for a lie-detector test before the missing-person fliers are printed.

In "Freedomland," when a white woman named Brenda Martin (Julianne Moore) reports she's been carjacked by a black man, she initially fails to mention her 4-year-old son was sleeping in the back seat. Antennae go up. Why wouldn't that terrifying tidbit be the first thing she says when she stumbles, admittedly dazed and bleeding, into a hospital?

But Lorenzo Council (Samuel L. Jackson), a New Jersey police detective, takes her seriously, as does Brenda's hotheaded brother (Ron Eldard), Danny Martin. He's a cop who suspects the carjacker lives in a housing project in the largely black community called Dempsy.

"We're gonna shut this down like East [expletive] Berlin," Danny vows. That doesn't go over well with residents who have witnessed police response to a half-dozen African-American homicides, and it pales next to that for one missing white child.

The stage is set for a full-blown racial conflagration between the mostly white blue-collar suburb of Gannon, where Brenda lives, and the high rises in the working-class-to- poor Dempsy next door. The media circus comes to town, cop turf battles break out, and an organized search party is launched.

That canvass leads to Freedomland, an abandoned state children's home now dilapidated, graffiti-ridden and haunted with ghosts of neglect and suffering past. Freedomland was anything but, and the same holds true for the Jersey neighborhoods where the mystery plays out.

"Freedomland," directed by Joe Roth, is based on the 1998 novel of the same name by Richard Price. He took his book, which runs 546 pages, and turned it into a movie that is about two hours long. It's not enough.

If moviegoers aren't complaining about content these days, they're grousing about running time, whether of "King Kong" or "Brokeback Mountain." The opposite is true of "Freedomland." It's as if Roth and Price try to pour a gallon of milk into a quart container. Something gets spilled or lost along the way, and the movie suffers for it.

One of the most interesting characters to step into the fray is Karen Collucci (a riveting Edie Falco, looking nothing like mob wife Carmela Soprano), herself the mother of a missing child. Her appearance feels abbreviated in a movie that reduces everything to bare bones.

Plot a point on the bell curve of crime -- cop to crook and everything in between -- and Jackson can play it, with energy to spare. Moore, usually a flawless favorite, seems miscast as a black sheep and former junkie "clean five years." You can only downplay her beauty so much, or maybe she's done the anguished mom one too many times.

More problematic is the resolution to the mystery, which proves both predictable and impossible to suss out, given what's doled out on screen. In the end, "Freedomland" could have used a little more freedom in telling a complex, atmospheric, character-rich story that, here, just skims the surface.