Queen & Slim

One of the side char­ac­ters in Queen & Slim describes the two out­laws of the title as ​“the black Bon­nie and Clyde”. As with the film that kick start­ed the so-called New Hol­ly­wood era, this promis­ing direc­to­r­i­al debut from Meli­na Mat­soukas, based on a script by Lena Wait­he, tan­gles with our emo­tion­al affil­i­a­tion to a pair of osten­si­ble crim­i­nals mak­ing a mad dash for freedom.

Yet here, no guns blaze, very lit­tle blood is spilled, and our heroes do every­thing in their might not to tip over that precipice to become anti-heroes. Which is both a bless­ing and a curse, as a sto­ry about avowed­ly vir­tu­ous crim­i­nals by proxy only serves to negate any sense of dan­ger or ambi­gu­i­ty from the proceedings.

Slim (Daniel Kalu­uya) and Queen (Jodie Turn­er-Smith) are rid­ing home from a semi-suc­cess­ful date, when a wild dog white traf­fic cop look­ing for any excuse to unsheathe his weapon pulls the pair over and, fol­low­ing an esca­lat­ing tus­sle, ends up dead. Wait­he is quick to frame the event as an acci­dent, yet the cou­ple con­vince them­selves that their lives are over, and that they should flee the scene.

The film then snaps into a leisure­ly, music-assist­ed road trip across the South­ern states, with folks along the way either help­ing or hin­der­ing the cause of these holy inno­cents. Aside from a few moments where the police net tight­ens and the crim­i­nal-lovers have to make a fast escape, there isn’t real­ly any sense of ten­sion, as the film is more focused on fram­ing the pair as trag­ic polit­i­cal icons in an Amer­i­ca where racial inequal­i­ty forces good peo­ple to take the law into their own hands.

The slight­ly awk­ward chem­istry between the leads keeps a will they/won’t they aspect in play, but so many of the vignettes feel unnat­ur­al, like they have been clum­si­ly fash­ioned around a hot but­ton polit­i­cal con­cern or sub-theme. This strat­e­gy is extreme­ly appar­ent in the film’s OTT finale.