More drama than action – not exactly what the trailer was selling.

I was talking to my partner about this and he said maybe after they made the movie they realised they could have made a better movie.  And so they cut the trailer to represent the movie they wished they’d made, rather than the movie they actually made.

The trailer sells a super excellent action flick populated with strong, black, female warriors slicing and dicing and vanquishing their enemies.  And this does happen a few times, and when it does, it is good.

But the primary story is a coming of age story centred around a young girl who refuses to take a husband, and thus is given to the warrior women by her father.  She’s not that good at following orders, and the lead warrior Nanisca (Viola Davis) likes to think she’s good at giving orders.  Clashes ensue.

Now Nanisca, in the trailer, is portrayed as strong and invincible and constantly rumble-ready.  But Nanisca in the movie is a lot more sad and haunted and dealing with some pretty extreme trauma and a singular need for personal revenge.  These two takes on her character jar quite a lot in my mind.

On top of this, there ends up being a connection between the upstart coming of age character and Nanisca and honestly it was all a bit much.  A bit sort of predictable, maybe?

They throw in a love-story/non-love story just for good measure of some kind.  There’s a king, and he has a lot of concubines.  There’s politics there.  There are slavers.  

The overarching idea is that two warring African kingdoms are selling their captives as slaves.  One of my favourite lines was when the Belgian (?) slave traders were complaining to the Oyo King (?) about the English and he replies “Your tribal warfare is of no interest to me.”  And then the Belgian traders reply that the African tribal warfare is only of interest to them as much as it gets them slaves.

It’s an okay story, but just not as excellent as I expected.  Perhaps I had my hopes too high.

J* gives it 3 stars.

PS.  It is, like Prey (2022), another of those films that makes the native language spoken English and subtitles all other languages.