****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****
My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Mindless, middlebrow movie devoid of meaningful drama, decent action or historical accuracy.
Sometimes a movie comes along and critics and audiences fawn all over it and then I watch it and wonder what the hell is wrong with these people?
The Woman King, an action movie about the Agojie, a real-life group of female soldiers in 1820’s Dahomey, Africa, is one of those movies.
The film, which stars Viola Davis and is directed Gina Prince-Blythewood, premiered back in September and it was greeted with an impressive 94% critical score and 99% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. It is now streaming on Netflix and I finally watched it and am utterly baffled by the love it’s received.
The Woman King got some more attention when the Oscar nominations came out because the usual suspects were bitching and moaning that the movie’s star, Viola Davis, was “snubbed”, and that the film’s director Gina Prince-Blythewood was too, both on account of their being black, and in Prince-Blythewood’s case also because she’s a female director. Sigh.
The arguments for The Woman King’s star and director being snubbed by the Oscars are so ridiculous as to be absurd.
For example, many pundits claimed the movie was awards-worthy because it was a “blockbuster” and that should have elevated its Oscar profile. Let’s be as clear as we can about this, The Woman King was not a “blockbuster” by any stretch of the imagination. The film made $94 million on a $50 million budget…which in the Hollywood accounting world means it probably didn’t even break even once you factor in marketing costs.
And let’s be even more real about The Woman King…it isn’t even remotely a good movie. It’s a painfully ordinary, rather silly sword and sandals, middlebrow movie that is burdened with a laughable script, piss poor direction and even worse fight choreography.
This movie is a painfully pedestrian action film, but simply because it’s about, stars and is directed by black women, it has magically been elevated into the “prestige” category. For example, one critic actually admitted in his positive review, “Every single beat of the plot is creaky and familiar, and if it had been a story about white people, it would have been a snore.” Yikes.
Gina Prince-Blythewood, whose last film was the clown show The Old Guard, simply is not a good director. On The Woman King her visuals are relentlessly flat and stale, and the performances from her cast obscenely forced and phony.
The film is really just an action movie so its action sequences should be its calling card, but just like with The Old Guard, the action sequences here are haphazard. Every battle is muddled and murky, poorly shot, poorly choreographed and poorly edited. The amateurish action cheese on-screen in this film makes a home video of a sandbox slap fight between toddlers look like Saving Private Ryan.
It also doesn’t help that these female super soldiers that can allegedly kick everybody’s ass look as weak as a geriatric sewing circle. If good old boy Buford Pusser from Walking Tall (the 1970’s original not the newer one starring The Rock) squared off all by himself against these crazy broads he’d beat them silly with his baseball bat in five minutes flat.
Viola Davis is supposed to be the baddest of badasses as Agojie General Nanisca but she looks like what she is…a nice, middle-aged lady with no muscle tone and probably some bone density loss.
Thuso Mbedu plays new girl Nawi who joins the Agojie, and she is a profoundly shoddy actress and an even worse action hero, as she looks like she’s allergic to exercise and has the upper body strength and muscle tone of a quadriplegic on a hunger strike.
Supporting actress Lashana Lynch plays warrior Izogie and looks like Don Cheadle in drag…which in this context could be construed as a compliment.
None of the acting in this movie rings anything but hollow. There’s lots of posing and preening and pretending on screen, but not any real acting. It’s like watching a girl’s junior high school drama club play act at being macho men.
The only performance that had any life to it was a rather hysterical portrayal of Dahomey King Ghezo by John Boyega. Boyega is so free and funny as the King he steals the whole damn movie.
The reason that other critics won’t tell you these hard truths about The Woman King is the same reason the movie was made in the first place…namely that it’s a black girl power story which makes it a glorious triumph among the weak-kneed woke buffoons in the establishment critical class regardless of its merit…or lack thereof. In other words, it’s a wonderful vehicle for critics to use to signal their virtue.
What makes the movie’s modern-day racial and political posturing so amusing is that The Woman King violently contorts and distorts actual history to such a degree its astonishing the movie didn’t collapse in on itself from its own gargantuan hypocrisy.
The film portrays the Agojie as female super soldiers, vastly superior to any men in combat and morally superior to them in the rest of life by being virulently and violently opposed to slavery. The reality is something very, very, very different. You see, in real life the Agojie and the Dahomey were unrepentant, shameless slave traders. Their economy depended on them kidnapping and capturing other Africans and selling them to Europeans and Americans who would then bring them to the new world.
As uncomfortable as this is to acknowledge, the truth is that black Africans were always vital partners to Europeans and Americans in the slave trade. In fact, it could be argued that without tribes like the Dahomey, which sold Africans to white slave traders, the infamous and calamitous slave trade to America would have been so difficult to make profitable as to be rendered essentially defunct.
Of course, that history is inconvenient to the modern Manichean victimhood narrative around slavery where white men are bad and black people saintly. It should be noted that actress Lupita Nyong’o, a native daughter of Kenya, nobly turned down a role in this film due to the “complicated” history regarding the Dahomey and slavery. Wise woman.
In this context, one can’t help but ponder…would there be more or less generational shame around slavery for black Americans if the actual truth about African complicity in the heinous crime of trans-Atlantic slavery were brought to the fore?
At least in that scenario blacks are not just hapless victims without agency who are too weak or disorganized or technologically inferior to overcome white devils and the monumental machinery of slavery. No, in this historically accurate scenario Africans are crucial cogs in the machinery of slavery itself and therefore are no longer stripped of agency but saddled with some, but obviously not anywhere close to all, responsibility. Would that be a better scenario to cleanse the perceived shame of their ancestors having been enslaved from African-American’s collective consciousness? Maybe, maybe not. My argument would be that the truth about slavery and African’s complicated complicity in it would be a better narrative to embrace in order to heal that grievous wound for the sole reason that it is the truth…and as we know the truth shall set you free.
To be clear, it doesn’t much matter what I think, but to be fair as an Irishman and a Catholic I know a wee bit about generational shame and the cultural and collective insecurities that fester over historical crimes. Take that for what it’s worth.
As if the slave history stuff in The Woman King weren’t enough, the notion of the Agojie as super soldiers is equally, if not more, ridiculous. Not surprisingly, in 1892 when, in one of the few times these female super soldiers fought an actual army, the French slaughtered them in an afternoon using only bayonets, killing 417 Agojie while only losing 6 of their own.
The question then becomes, with the ugly history of Dahomey slave trading and Agojie military incompetence, why not just make up a fictional story about an imaginary tribe in Africa with great female warriors? I suppose that’s already been done with Marvel’s Black Panther movies…but The Woman King wants to be a real inspiration to black women and delusional feminist fools everywhere, so they manufactured a false story and just labelled it history in order to give it weight, meaning and purpose and garner prestige.
What is most egregious about this approach though is that the movie goes out of its way to whitewash the historical crimes of the Dahomey and place them instead in the hands of reliable movie villains…white men. In the film, Viola Davis’ Nanisca even says, “the white man has brought immorality here!” Ummm…if history is any guide the Dahomey seemed quite advanced when it came to immorality well before the white man ever showed up.
Of course, changing history to make a better story is not exactly breaking new ground in Hollywood, so the crimes of The Woman King in that regard can be shrugged off in the name of empty-headed entertainment…but what can’t be so easily forgiven is the numerous crimes against artistry and drama that the film commits.
The bottom line is that The Woman King is an instantaneously forgettable film that is deserving of neither critical acclaim nor award recognition. That gullible audiences are so dopey as to enjoy this third-rate, cheesy girl power garbage only speaks to the calamitous lowering of taste and standards across the entirety of our culture. I do admit that I wish the Agojie were real though, just so they could mount an offensive and wipe out the philistines who enjoy this sort of mindless junk.
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