Emancipation critique: Will Smith's relentlessly brutal slave epic is a B-movie with delusions of grandeur

A super-bloated B-movie with little golden illusions of grandeur, Antoine Fuqua's utterly Oscar-looted "Emancipation" is the kind of immaculate dud that can only happen because Hollywood is spinning off-axis. Because the American film industry has sacrificed mid-budget programmers on the altar of monolithic franchise blockbusters, original stories can only be expected to be told if they fuel the awards machine and/or create a sense of cultural importance. So you end up with the director of "Olympus Has Fallen" making a stiff-jawed slavery epic that desperately wants to be something much smaller - and a little less important.

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It was never an option. Due to its release date, subject matter and star power, 'Emancipation' was created to be viewed through the same narrow lens of the system that produced it, and 'The Slap' - an existential threat. for any feature so dependent on the Oscars for market enthusiasm - ironically did even more to fit the film into Hollywood's annual horse race at its own expense.

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"Emancipation" is based on the true story of Gordon (referred to here as Peter), a man whose keloid image was captured in a series of calling card photographs that were taken to a Union camp in Baton Rouge after escaping from a plantation about 40 miles away and surviving a 10-day trek through murderous swamps; the sight of his mutilated back was later used to help the abolitionist movement convey the atrocities of slavery to a disbelieving world.

The relentlessly brutal film Fuqua made about him aspires to have the same effect on modern audiences, whose imaginations might struggle to comprehend the most visceral sins of the 19th century and/or recognize the very that America's unresolved biases continue to pose as we move deeper into the 21. It's a noble ambition for a movie, but it's not an ambition for which > film was conceived.



Here's a $130 million prestige image that better captures the aftermath of 'The Revenant' than Reconstruction (Fuqua's epic looks just as silly and sadistic as Alejandro González's Best Picture nominee Iñárritu, so fortunately never so pretentious). “Emancipation” takes on the task of depicting the true horrors of human servitude as it basks in fast-paced action scenes, leaves Ben Foster off leash as the fried Southern Amon Göth who is obsessed with putting at the pace of the story's hero, and - best of all - forces Will Smith into a knife fight with an alligator in a scene that seems all the more ridiculous for being rendered in some of the finest cinematography under- monochrome seascapes from "The Night of the Hunter".

(At one point in this supposedly serious movie on the most serious subjects, this same alligator leaps out of nowhere and gnaws at an enslaved fugitive, causing the kind of popcorn jerk that would feel more at home in a summer blockbuster than here.)

American moviegoers are used to consuming their history lessons with a thick layer of artificial butter on top, but William N. Collage's screenplay filters Gordon's saga through so many gritty Hollywood tropes that the over-the-top genre starts to feel more honest by comparison. At least the opening scene where Peter tears off the door frame of the plantation's slave quarters as he is dragged away from his family records with raw emotional truth.