When watching The Woman King, two things kept popping into my mind. Black Panther and Liam Neeson. Let me explain.
The Woman King (dir Gina Prince-Bythewood) follows Nanisca (Viola Davis) the leader of the Agojie, an all-women fighting force for the Kingdom of Dahomey. Dahomey is in conflict with the Oyo empire. The film neatly creates the Oyo as the evil slave traders and Dahomey as the good people trying to get rid of the slavers.
The truth is always a little grey. With white Europeans writing a lot of the history of people from Africa, Nanisca is a fictionalised character, but King Ghezo (John Boyega) was a real person who ruled at that time. Dahomey, the Agojie, and the Oyo are all real. Dahomey was very progressive at the time in regard to women’s rights but they were more heavily involved in the slave trade than the movie suggests.
Enough for the history lesson. Nanisca is trying to convince the young King to stop their involvement in the slave trade while trying to train the next generation of Agojie. Nawi (Thuso Mbedu) is too unruly to take a husband so her father gives her to the King in tribute to be trained as an Agojie.
This is where the film becomes a little confusing because we spend a lot of time with Nawi and it felt like it became a film about her, but then it shifts back focus to Nanisca. I think using Nawi as the audience surrogate would have been the better choice. She was learning the world of the Agojie as we were.
Black Panther showed the world in 2018 that you can have a successful mainstream movie with a mostly Black cast going on to gross US1.34 billion dollars. It showed young people of colour from all around the world that they could be superheroes too. Representation matters. The Woman King has benefited from that pioneering work releasing a nearly full Black cast but also focusing on a female lead story.
With the Oyo preparing to attack the wiser Nanisca needs to learn some tricks from the younger Navi, while Navi still has to learn that she doesn’t know it all. The fight scenes are good, but not great, there were still lots of stuntmen waiting to be hit because the main actor wasn’t ready for them yet. There wasn’t anything innovative in how they approached the fights but it did make me think of Liam Neeson.
How does a Northern Irish actor pop into my head when watching a film of mainly Black women? Well, it is because he transitioned from a dramatic actor in such films as Schindlers List before switching to an action film actor in Taken. Neeson was given a hard time for his lack of athletic ability and many quick-cut sequences had to be created to make it look like he was a formidable opponent. This same idea could be put to Davis who has been an impressive dramatic actor before making this action film.
As the climax happens it is a lot of paint-by-numbers, friends die, loyalties are challenged, and there is a big boss fight. It is never a boring film but I do feel it is a bit confusing story-wise on whom it wants to concentrate.
Luke McMeeken-Ruscoe
24 October 2022