Nolte: Critics Brutalize Will Smith’s Slave Drama ‘Emancipation’

Apple’s big Oscar push this year, director Antoine Fuqua’s Emancipation, appears to be as dead in the water as Apple’s previous bid to win this year’s Oscar, Peter Farrelly’s The Greatest Beer Run Ever.

Last year, Apple won Best Picture with CODA. Apple didn’t produce CODA but did acquire it prior to Oscar night, so that counts.

Supposedly, Apple is also sitting on Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon and Ridley Scott’s Napoleon. The former stars Leonardo DiCaprio, the latter Joaquin Phoenix. But in its infinite wisdom, Apple chose to go with Beer Run and then Emancipation.

Thus far, Emancipation holds a brutal 53 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes and even more brutal 57 percent Metascore. Granted, the slave drama has only screened for a handful of select critics, but those invites were all about juicing Oscar buzz, and it’s backfired.

Because we can no longer trust the overall critical class (young, shallow, identity-consumed, affirmative-action hires who know nothing about film history) to do anything other than write dishonest reviews focused on increasing their status, we have to dig into the subtext to understand what’s going on.

I’m thinking of three possibilities…

The first is that Emancipation is one of those woke movies that is just that bad, so bad even clout-addicted critics can’t bring themselves to prostitute a rave.

The second is that Will Smith is still so tainted by The Slap, it doesn’t matter how good Emancipation is. His appalling behavior at the Oscars has made it impossible to suspend disbelief.

The third — and I hope this is the one — is that Antoine Fuqua did with Emancipation what he does with everything he touches: turn it into a genre film, a B-movie about something important, but still a B-movie.

Here’s a taste of the complaints:

Roger Ebert.com:

The character of Peter and the propulsive mood of Fuqua’s film have more in common with “The Legend of Nigger Charley” than “12 Years a Slave.” It’s not altogether clear, however, that Fuqua’s choices are all that intentional to believe he purposely wants this sort of uncomfortable genre-bending.

The Associated Press:

It comes as some relief that Antoine Fuqua’s “Emancipation,” starring Will Smith as a runaway slave in Civil War-era Louisiana, is not, at least traditionally speaking, an Oscar movie.

Despite the film’s important historical backdrop, its awards-season timing and its inevitable connection to last March’s Academy Awards ceremony, the site of the Slap, “Emancipation” is not quite the solemn prestige picture you could easily mistake it for. It’s an action thriller.

Here’s my favorite, from Deadline. You can practically cut the self-involved pretension with a knife:

The thought of walking out crossed my mind several times. Not because the film wasn’t up to par, but seeing so much Black death onscreen is exhausting and painful, and there is only so much I can take — even if the ending of a film is hopeful. Barry Jenkins’ The Underground Railroad limited series is ruthless in execution but had the intuition to approach the history in a unique way that made it worth watching. What are other films doing that is beyond the generic? Is there something new to expect from what the audience is going to see? Is there anything else besides seeing relentless violence? The story of “Whipped Peter” and the impact he had on the culture of war and American slavery live on to this day, but there has to be another way to tell these stories.

There has to be another way.

Yeah, another way would be to get over yourself.

All the right people seem to be hating on this fictionalized account of “Whipped Peter” for all the right reasons.

Now, I kinda wanna see it.

My sources might not be accurate, but I’m told Emancipation’s best moment happens while Will Smith’s character struggles through 40 miles of swamp. He’s attacked by an alligator, is barely able to free himself, punches the gator in the face, and says, “Welcome to Earth, bitch.”

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.