Yahoo News Emancipation review: Will Smith is on the run in a ruthless slavery drama
What we know for sure about a man called "Whipped Peter" is as scant as a picture and a paragraph: He was enslaved on a Louisiana plantation and escaped; he somehow survived 40 treacherous miles of swamp and made it to a Union safehold in Baton Rouge, where a portrait of him stripped to the waist — his back a constellation of keloid scars incurred from a vicious whipping — became a galvanizing spark for the abolitionist movement.
That notorious photograph doesn't appear until deep into the second hour of Emancipation (streaming this Friday on AppleTV+), maybe because Peter's place in history is the thing the movie finds least interesting about him. Instead, director Antoine Fuqua reimagines him as the almost superhuman action hero of a harrowing and often baroquely violent revenge thriller: a bloodied but unbowed warrior battling a raft of savage beasts (alligators, water snakes, Confederates) to make his way homeward at any cost.
Apple TV+ Will Smith in 'Emancipation'
Will Smith, his cheekbones hollowed and eyes burning, plays Peter as a devoted family man and faithful Christian whose fury lies so close to the surface it seems like a minor miracle that he's managed to stay alive this far; he would rather take a terrible beating than allow even one small injustice to stand. But there's not much he can do when his owner dispatches him to a distant job laying train tracks, separating him from his wife Dodienne (The Good Fight's Charmaine Bingwa) and four children.
The railroad camp turns out to be a sort of murderous gulag, where enslaved workers are beaten and killed with a malice so casual and consistent it feels like nothing less than institutionalized sadism. There are no good men here, only more or less merciful deaths, supervised by a sociopathic overseer with a honeyed Southern drawl called Fassel (Ben Foster) — the kind of full-tilt villain who likes to squint malevolently and smoke his pipe while telling his charges things like "I'm your God — you walk the Earth because I let you."
Smith's Peter swiftly becomes Fassel's main antagonist, a natural leader he can't control, and one he chases down with a doggedness that seems deeply personal (if not straight-up pathological) once he manages to escape the camp and find a way into the swamp. That's where the natural world, with its many fanged and four-legged hazards, comes in, and Fuqua (The Guilty, Training Day) hurtles through Peter's swamp-survival narrative with an urgency that feels both stripped-down and operatic, framing it all via grand God's-eye vistas and excruciating closeups stripped almost completely of color, like a tinted old-time daguerreotype.
Whether moviegoers need more punishing stories of Black pain in 2022 has become the subject of much debate; the director of Till, released last month, deliberately chose not to show the monstrous violence visited on 14-year-old Emmett Till, focusing instead only on the lead-up to his 1955 lynching and its aftermath. Fuqua clearly doesn't belong to that school, and it's a testament to Smith's innate stardom that he's able to so thoroughly inhabit a role drawn almost entirely in bold outlines. (Whether you can suspend thoughts of the actor's own ideas of vengeance while watching him do it, of course, lies with the viewer.) His conviction carries Emancipation a long way, elevating what is essentially a B movie to the realm of something better than its outsize premise: a blunt instrument, maybe, but a brutally affecting one too. Grade: B
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