The Woman King

The Woman King (2022) is a movie my wife and I caught in theatres last night. The storyline follows an African kingdom with a new(er) king in 1823 who posses the only female army in Africa. The leader of the female Army has a past that haunts her but the respect of her king, enough to be on his council. She strongly urges him to avoid the slave trade and find alternative methods of riches. Meanwhile, those who do believe strongly in the slave trade look to march on the kingdom and bring them down. A new recruitment class to the female army brings brashness, new ideas to defend the kingdom, and the female leader's ghosts back to the forefront...

This movie is directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood (Love & Basketball) and stars Viola Davis (The Help), Thuso Mbedu (The Underground Railroad), Lashana Lynch (No Time to Die), Sheila Atim (Doctor Strange: In the Mouth of Madness), John Boyega (Star Wars: Episode VII-IV) and Jimmy Odukoya (Mamba's Diamond).

This movie has so much depth and contains a great primary plot and even better sub plots. The writing is remarkable, thorough and very impressive. The character's inner demons are well portrayed as is their struggle to overcome them. The acting is out of this world across the board. You feel for every character; and if anything happens to anyone, you feel personally hurt. The villains were also excellent as is the outcome of each of them. The settings and cinematography is outstanding and there is impressive use of lighting. The action scenes are remarkable and the fight choreography is award winning caliber. My only complaint is an awkward love story that is obviously in here to show maturity and self discovery but I could have done without it.

Overall, this movie has literally everything you'd want in a movie - tremendous action, great villains, self discovery and character triumph. I would strongly, strongly recommend seeing this movie and score it a 10/10. We loved it.

When murderers, rapists and slave traders are presented as heroes and liberators, it is disgusting. It is disgusting to see how some directors and actors try to present evil with good. How something terrible is twisted to make it look beautiful. It is as if serial maniacs and murderers who killed hundreds of people in the most brutal ways would be made noble and just heroes. He killed 30 people, dismembered and ate them, oh no no, he was a hero who helps children with cancer. It's disgusting and I want to vomit from such cynicism! The acting is mediocre, even below average. And the appeals of the main characters to visit cinemas to watch this cynical lie. Strong female characters, heroes that the public should know about, good and honest people - all this will be on the screens someday, but not in this film!

In some ways this movie feels like a student that is trying to get to the minimum page/ word count on an essay by recycling the same information and presenting it in slightly different ways. In the end it certainly met the metaphorical page count with a run time over 2 hours, but like essays that use filler and don't advance the thesis or plot it receives a poor score in my books.

Despite taking such a methodical approach to building the story it makes a critical error by not building its characters deeply enough. This was troublesome for me as the director was clearly aiming to succeed by displaying the deep human connections that developed between the women. Unfortunately, that success is hindered by the fact that the connection between two characters is not as convincing when each individual character on their own is lacking in depth.

A couple examples where this issue manifests is during the battle scenes. In my opinion, these scenes were some of the more entertaining moments, but there are so many characters that we knew so little about that it was less impactful when one or several of them were lost in battle.

There were some other issues with it that further detracted from its success. The cinematography was unimpressive and some of the fake accents are difficult to understand.

Perhaps I'm too harsh on it with my review because there is nothing about the movie that makes it horrible, but it just lacks in some critical aspects that strongly diminish its entertainment value.

So the good: Viola Davis! Viola Davis was so fantastic! She must have really worked out and trained for this role too. She looked amazing and was very believable as an a**kicking leader. The scenery and design was great. I liked the general feel of the filming and cinematography.

The bad: basically everything else. The "African" accents were cartoon bad. Really they were borderline offensive. If you'd played a clip of this and told me it was a 70's black exploitation movie I would not have argued with you. The "history" in this film was basically a complete rewrite of the history and the people. I guess you could say "loosely based" on historical events. Several of the other actors were cartoon villains... just not very good.

So three stars for the magnificent Viola Davis but racing to see this movie ASAP was a bit of a waste. If you're a huge fan it's worth catching her performance but otherwise give it a pass.

This is a historically unreliable movie. And the slavegrowers are exposed as good. The authors hide the name of the product, which the tribe sold, sold slaves to America. They make good people who ritually killed children, cut the throats of children, knitted other Africans and sold them as slaves to America. A pseudo-historical film, the Portuguese who were absent during this time period, and all the action shows a fictional world and actions. They are trying to impose a false story to show that white men are evil. Although this African country was bathed in blood and enslaved other African countries into slavery.