‘Emancipation’ Review: Will Smith’s Unrelentingly Brutal Slave Epic Is a B Movie with Delusions of Grandeur - Yahoo Entertainment

An over-inflated B movie with little gold delusions of grandeur, Antoine Fuqua’s thoroughly Oscar-pilled “Emancipation” is the kind of immaculate misfire that could only happen because Hollywood is spinning off its axis.

By virtue of its release date, subject matter, and star power alone, “Emancipation” was created to be seen through the same narrow lens of the system that produced it, and “The Slap” — an existential threat to any feature so dependent upon the Oscars for market enthusiasm — ironically did even more to yoke the movie into Hollywood’s annual horse race at its own expense.

“Emancipation” is based on the true story of Gordon (here referred to as Peter), a man whose keloid-scarred image was captured on a series of carte de visite photographs that were taken at a Union camp in Baton Rouge after he escaped from a plantation some 40 miles away and survived a 10-day trek across deadly swampland; the sight of his mutilated back was then used to help the abolitionist movement convey the atrocities of slavery to a disbelieving world.

That’s a noble ambition for a movie to have, but it’s not an ambition this movie was built to achieve.

“Emancipation” tasks itself with depicting the true horrors of human bondage at the same time as it basks in speed-ramped action setpieces, lets Ben Foster off the leash as a Southern-fried Amon Göth who’s obsessed with bringing the story’s hero to heel, and — best of all — forces Will Smith into a knife fight with an alligator in a scene that feels all the more ridiculous because it’s rendered in some of the most gorgeous monochrome underwater cinematography since “The Night of the Hunter.”.

It would be one thing if she just served as the north star that’s motivating him back to his family, but “Emancipation” also forces the actress to deliver a clunky monologue in a cold sweat before using her character to gin up some awfully cheap suspense an hour later.

In keeping with the “Revenant” of it all, a cynic might think of Smith’s work here as the kind of self-abasing performance that a movie star gives before they win an Oscar (at various points in the story Peter smothers himself in mud, shit, and onions), and it’s true that “Emancipation” was in the works long before Smith emerged as the Best Actor favorite for “King Richard.” A more generous take might conclude that Smith’s uncomplicated stoicism helps Peter to lead us through hell without distracting us from it, the character serving as a Virgilian tour guide through Fuqua’s increasingly phantasmagoric inferno of dismembered bodies, decapitated heads, and disemboweled soldiers

But even the most effective moments here betray the implication that Fuqua’s epic is, like the image that inspired it, a movie that conveys what “slavery truly felt like.”

Whatever its aims, “Emancipation” is ultimately a movie that conveys nothing so much as how modern artists re-create images of what slavery felt like, and under what financial circumstances they’re able to do so