Eman­ci­pa­tion

A macabre B‑movie in Oscar bait cloth­ing, Eman­ci­pa­tion sees genre hand Antoine Fuqua take a more-than-work­able cat-and-mouse chase thriller and plant it with­in the con­text of Amer­i­can slavery’s dying days. Will Smith plays a glow­er­ing and rebel­lious Hait­ian enslaved man named Peter who is mer­ci­less­ly ripped from the embrace of his wife and chil­dren to forcibly build a rail­road that would serve to empow­er a strong­hold of Con­fed­er­ate army rebels in north­ern Louisiana.

Ben Fos­ter plays a beady-eyed, pony-tailed slave hunter whose per­for­mance appears to be mod­elled after one of the nas­ti­er Ter­mi­na­tors, and when the edu­cat­ed Peter hears of Abra­ham Lincoln’s edict to eman­ci­pate Black peo­ple from the bonds of slav­ery, he and a small band of cohorts make a death-defy­ing dash for the trees and, then, the hunt is very much on.

Despite its ges­tures towards the iconog­ra­phy of the late pre-bel­lum south, the film is more con­cerned with smug­gling the thrills and spills of a flighty action epic to the screen. One sequence, in which Smith is filmed by a swoop­ing drone-cam as he scarpers through the treach­er­ous bay­ou, feels com­plete­ly at odds with both the grave nature of the sit­u­a­tion, and any attempt to cul­ti­vate a styl­is­tic tone that enhances the seri­ous­ness of the material.

Smith’s mus­cu­lar cen­tral per­for­mance is laud­able, even if his char­ac­ter adds up to lit­tle more than a mud­dle of liv­ing deity clichés of the sort so often chan­nelled by Mel Gib­son and Kevin Cost­ner in the 1990s. His unim­peach­able ethics and con­sis­tent desire to sac­ri­fice his liveli­hood for the greater cause bol­sters the urgency of the film’s theme while leav­ing us with a pro­tag­o­nist with­out con­flict or any real dra­mat­ic dimen­sions. The way in which. Fuqua deliv­ers this sto­ry reveals all-too-quick­ly how things will even­tu­al­ly play out – and they do.

One strange deci­sion is to shoot the entire film in aggres­sive­ly desat­u­rat­ed tones, pre­sum­ably to empha­sise the harsh, bar­ren nature of the land­scape. Occa­sion­al­ly the plush green of a leaf or the washed-out orange from a flame will pierce through mud­dy visu­al pati­na, but it almost looks as if Fuqua want­ed to film this in black and white and had to do the next best thing. The bog­gy aes­thet­ic ugli­ness is per­haps fit­ting for the mate­r­i­al, yet it also works as a visu­al dis­trac­tion, as at times you’re left to won­der if the film isn’t being pro­ject­ed prop­er­ly, or whether the colour grade has gone all wrong.

The film arrives at an every­thing-in-the-pot cli­max which appears to dis­pense with any pre­tence towards his­tor­i­cal seri­ous­ness in favour of unal­loyed explo­sive spec­ta­cle. It’s a shame, because the huge final set-piece feels ripe for a deep­er polit­i­cal and his­tor­i­cal inves­ti­ga­tion than it receives here. Peter’s unflap­pable, occa­sion­al­ly unbe­liev­able hero­ism is placed front and cen­tre, and it’s near­ly always at the expense of mak­ing Eman­ci­pa­tion a rich­er and more var­ied expe­ri­ence as a piece of cinema.