Emancipation – Film Review

Peter, a slave, flees a plantation in Louisiana after he was whipped within an inch of his life. He has to outwit cold-blooded hunters and the unforgiving swamps of Louisiana on a torturous journey north.

The brand new historical action film from Antoine Fuqua, Emancipation, is an extremely daunting one – mainly because of how long it is. Movies dealing with slavery are never easy to watch because it’s often disheartening to watch how people of color used to be treated so many years ago, and this movie is no different.

In the opening few scenes alone we see just how terrible slave owners were and we can feel the Black pain just by looking at their eyes, whether it’s Will Smith‘s character or someone else’s. But aside from being a sickening look at how rampant racism was back in the day, Emancipation isn’t a good movie, unfortunately.

A lot of this movie reminded me of Sam Mendes‘ 1917. So many scenes in the film seemed as if they were shot in one take, and while that’s certainly impressive, that’s not the only thing that’s important when it comes to crafting an excellent film. We need an excellent story first and foremost, and sadly, this movie doesn’t have one.

This is absolutely one of those movies in which you can tell that the writers just kind of ran out of ideas as to what to do with it after the first thirty minutes and decided to wing it for the rest. William N. Collage seemed to have a particularly clear path for the story in the first act only for it to go in a wildly different direction for the remaining two.

But the element that bothered me the most about this film was the fact that it’s essentially just one gigantic action movie. It felt so out of place and it was incredibly jarring. I have to respect Fuqua for wanting to try something new, but it just felt like such a disconnect from what was going on in the story.

This should’ve been a super intense, searing look at the lives of these slaves and their owners, rather than being an explosion-heavy action spectacle. Are these action sequences entertaining? For the most part, yes, but there are also other instances in which they’re incredibly frustrating, and you can’t help but think about the kind of film this could’ve been had it not been an action movie.

Will Smith does a fantastic job in the lead role of Peter, however. Obviously, this is the first film the actor has been in since the infamous Oscars slap incident earlier in the year, but don’t let that take away from the fact that he’s legitimately brilliant here. He doesn’t bring anything game-changing to the table, but for the kind of role that he needed to play, he more than nailed it.

There are certainly some qualities to this film that are great, but there are also a handful that are extremely frustrating and some that are just downright bad. Overall, this is a movie that you should probably just skip out on, unless you’re a humongous fan of either Fuqua or Smith’s work.

Antoine Fuqua’s Emancipation dares to take some big creative swings, but it never quite manages to tell a compelling story despite starting off remarkably strong.