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Emancipation movie review & film summary (2022) - Roger Ebert

Emancipation movie review & film summary (2022) - Roger Ebert

Dec 02, 2022 3 mins, 21 secs

They ask him to turn his scourged back toward the lens, to move his face to the side.

Peter asks, "Why are you doing this?" The photographer reverently responds: "So the world might know what slavery truly looks like." In a film that doesn't care much about the universally historic impact of the image known as "Whipped Peter," the conversation is ironic.

Granted, director Antoine Fuqua's "Emancipation" isn't wholly about enslavement.

If that tension between disparate styles and unlikely tones was intended, one might say that "Emancipation" is a keen attempt to recapture the subversive slave narratives in Blaxploitation?

The character of Peter and the propulsive mood of Fuqua's film have more in common with "The Legend of Nigger Charley" than "12 Years a Slave." It's not altogether clear, however, that Fuqua's choices are all that intentional to believe he purposely wants this sort of uncomfortable genre-bending. .

A symbol, a resilient rebel, a family man, an action star this side of Rambo wandering the swamp and fighting with slave catchers and alligators.

Fuqua believes Peter is all of the above.

Unfortunately, in wearing these many hats, "Emancipation" becomes an exhaustive, vicious, and stylistically overcooked recounting of a man whose very visage led the abolitionist charge.

"Emancipation" is a hollow piece of genre filmmaking that rarely answers, "Why this story and why now?" .

Set in 1863, in the wake of Abraham Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation, the true story begins with a series of drone tracking shots that make their way through the wooded swamp, stretching over a cotton plantation whereby enslaved African Americans, who appear placed in by garish VFX, toil in the soil.

In a shack, a doting Peter (Will Smith) caresses the slender foot of his wife Dodienne (Charmaine Bingwa) with water as their children surround them.

Their faith, unfortunately, cannot hide them from the realities of this system: Two white men drag Peter from his family, causing him to pull the frame of the door from the walls in an attempt to stay with his loved ones.

For Smith, Peter is slightly different from the prototypical roles he plays.

Never a master of accents (his infamous performance in "Concussion" says as much), Smith opts to go the route taken by British actors who alter their voice to an American tone; he lowers his voice an octave and adds a few necessary inflections.

The slightly hunched posture Smith walks with says that Peter is bent but never broken (an appearance that could carry additional weight if William N. Collage's on-the-nose screenplay didn't have Peter use that exact description to describe himself). .

Not content with allowing the menacing Fassel to portray his God complex, Collage's script again makes the characterization obvious when Fassel tells Peter that he is his "God." At every turn, you get the sense that "Emancipation" could easily be an intelligent interrogation of the role of religion in slavery.

But Collage and Fuqua aren't capable of moving past a surface-level examination of such fervent faith in relation to a system that makes one feel spiritually gripped with the notion of salvation.

Peter's escape takes up much of the film's bloated run time as he traverses over hellish landscapes devoid of color, recalling the war-torn landscape of Andrei Tarkovsky's "Ivan's Childhood" and the apocalyptic flare of Barry Jenkins' "The Underground Railroad." Unlike those works, frustratingly, "Emancipation" doesn't use the trek to flesh out these characters fully?

Apart from his unflinching devotion to God and his family, what makes Peter, Peter?

The drudging score doesn't add any further life to the proceedings either.

"Emancipation" hurries toward a happy conclusion that somehow feels unearned in a film that requires the viewer to sit through two-plus hours of degradation to arrive at this moment of solace.

The journey to get here doesn't carry the necessary subversiveness or humanization.

Fuqua's film needs to either fully embrace the action components for a full Blaxploitation tilt or lean closer toward its prestige aims to work

"Emancipation" is too constrained to be freeing.   

Jayson Warner Smith

Summarized by 365NEWSX ROBOTS

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