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'Emancipation' - Antoine Fuqua & Will Smith Runaway Slave Thriller


Ale

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Well ... this sucks :(
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/emancipation_2023

I'm gonna find out in a week (I'll get Apple TV just for that alone) but I have to wonder ... could it possibly be some kinf od weird vendetta against Smith?

I find it REALLY hard to believe that both Smith and Fuqua would screw up a topic like this :(

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Finally some good news :)

"Apple insiders say that the just launched Antoine Fuqua-directed Will Smith-starrer Emancipation has drawn +27% new viewers to Apple TV+ and has become the No. 1 movie internationally including in Mexico, Brazil, Canada, Australia, Italy, France, Germany and Korea."

https://deadline.com/2022/12/spirited-emancipation-selena-gomez-documentary-break-records-apple-original-films-poised-for-bigger-2023-1235200124/ 

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On 12/12/2022 at 2:06 PM, fan 4ever said:

Who has seen the movie already? What are your thoughts?  I wanted to watch it this weekend but didn't get to it. I'll try this week. 

It's getting bad reviews from critics. It has an 48% on Rotten Tomatoes. Audience score is 90% though.

I watched it yesterday. It was good and at times very good. Smith's performance was understated but fit the bigger picture perfectly in my mind. I do think however his performance in King Richard was far greater.
 Emancipation just wasn't as good as I hoped it would be. It was a solidly made and solidly acted movie that didn't add anything new to chew on and discuss if someone's seen movies like 12 Years A Slave.
My biggest issue with the film is that they seemed to pull back on a whole bunch of interesting ideas in order to focus on the "runaway" aspect of the film.
For example, we see the famous scars but we don't actually see how he got them and by the time the photo is taken we realize we never really knew anything about what his life as a slave looked like prior to the events from the beginning of the film. We see his wife and children wondering if he's alive and there's a brief subplot there with a ... violent resolution but then it's just dropped and never mentioned again. Ben Foster is an amazing actor but here he's not  really given the chance to fully spread his wings as we all know he can. Not to mention his two henchmen, on of whom is black and that potentially interesting theme also barely gets acknowledged and resolved with a single line of dialogue. 
What doesn't disappoint is Fuqua - I honestly have no idea where the hate towards him is coming from in the reviews I've seen. The film is beautifully shot with an interesting choice for color palette and captures the treacherous Louisiana swamps perfectly. Not that I've ever been there :D but you really do get the idea of how much courage it took to risk running through all of that in order to get your freedom. Also I love Fuqua's handling of battle/war scenes which we see in the third act. Some truly inspiring shots there.
In the end it's kind of a frustrating situation where I think the movie is really good but here and there I saw the potential for it to be great. A potential that wasn't really fulfilled.

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