African queens
The Woman King suffers from only one seriously unanswerable flaw, in my estimation, and it is unfortunately a pretty significant one given what the film is. Namely, its scenes of 19th Century warfare, using a mixture of guns, traditional African tribal weaponry, and what I greatly suspect are some weapons much too fanciful to be "traditional" in any sense other than that '70s Hong Kong kung fu movies are a type of tradition, are not very good. Where exactly the pinpoint the problem takes a bit of doing, because if nothing else, what we see of the fight choreography seems to be awfully good - what we see of it. For the problem here is that it has been edited all the way to shit, which may or may not be the fault of director Gina Prince-Bythewood and her longtime editor Terilyn A. Shropshire, though it is tough to want to extend them too much benefit of the doubt on this front, since they both served in those same exact roles in the creation of the terrible 2020 Netflix superhero movie The Old Guard, the first action film for either of them, and a simply fucking ghastly failure of that genre. But it also may or may not be the fault of the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused particular issues for this production during its time in South Africa in 2021, and it may very well be that the shooting of the action scenes was so badly compromised that the herky-jerky, almost illegible collage of actioney images, always happy to use twelve shots to achieve what could have been readily handled with three or four, was simply because they were left without any steak at all, and had to work like hell to kick up some sizzle. I am somewhat reluctant to go all that way in that direction, since the "action" that has been turned into such bloody ribbons by the editing is often something along the lines of "a character moves from a brisk walk into a run".
So we have, in other words, a historical action film with some pretty rough action. It has also come under the charge of having some pretty rough history, though that's much less of a bother. I really know nothing at all about the Kingdom of Dahomey, where The Woman King takes place, so I can't really say whether it actually takes a butcher's cleaver to history or not. I assume it probably does, because it is (other than the action thing) a wildly watchable and compelling movie, one of 2022's best popcorn films, and my experience has generally been that movies which are extremely scrupulous about their history mostly aren't very fun or interesting to watch, compared to movies that are more concerned with their own story and settle for "whatever, close enough". The obvious comparison to The Woman King - like, I sort of couldn't get the film out of my head at any point during The Woman King's expansive but never terribly slow 135 minutes - is Braveheart, a surreally bad history lesson that's a rip-snorting violent spectacle that I, for my part, persist in thinking is just a real damn good time at the movies. So whatever it's doing to history, The Woman King is in good company.
The film's story, which comes to us from Maria Bello of all people, alongside Dana Stevens (who eventually wrote the script; absolutely nothing in her rather grim-looking CV implies she had this kind of work in her), centers on a conflict between Dahomey, currently being ruled by the none-too-secure King Ghezo (John Boyega), and the Oyo Empire, which has treated the smaller kingdom as a vassal state. Of late, Dahomey's all-woman army of elite soldiers, the Agojie, has been able to liberate Dahomey slaves from the Oyo, which has brought the unhappiness between the powers to a high boil; just to make things even worse, the Oyo are themselves in the Portuguese sphere of influence, and in 1823 when The Woman King takes place, Portugal was still actively involved in the transatlantic slave trade and wanted no unrest disrupting their efforts in that area. So the war quickly turns into Dahomey - which means, in practice, mostly just the Agojie - versus the Oyo being supported by Portuguese resources. Within that broad canvas, the film touches on a few specific individuals, with the one given the most prominence being General Nanisca (Viola Davis), the head of the Agojie, though the functional role of protagonist is more closely filled by new recruit Nawi (Thuso Mbedu); the "featured" supporting warriors are Izogie (Lashana Lynch) and Amenza (Sheila Atim).
Those four women are the heart of what makes The Woman King such a delight to watch: it has extremely solid old-fashioned craftsmanship. This is old-school epic filmmaking, even if the film's running time doesn't quite bring us into the company of a Proper Epic. But what it's great at is giving us just enough of The Enormous Context Of War, Politics, And God Knows What to feel a sense of grandeur and enormous stakes, while actually situating nearly all of its storytelling in the particular matter of its core characters. That is to say, while The Woman King seems to make the argument that what we should care about is the question of whether Dahomey will be able to shake loose from Oyo oppression, and what this means for the future of the slave trade, in the moment of watching it, what seems much more gripping and important is the far more personal conflict between Nanisca and her opposite number in the Oyo army, General Oba Ade (Jimmy Odukoya). This conflict is not merely rooted in the present, but involves a Dark Secret from the Past which can be pretty much immediately grasped in essentially all particulars, but to its enormous credit, The Woman King obviously realises that we'll have figured it out, so it presents the preservation of the Secret as something more about characters being unwilling to talk to each other because of their own self-protective shells, than because they are setting up a shocking twist.
That is very much where The Woman King triumphs: as a character story. The film is almost entirely without weak performances - the one that I think just does not work is Jordan Bolger's turn as the rather watery and simpering half-Dahomey, half-Portuguese Malik, who ends up serving as Nawi's love interest. But that's not even her main subplot, so he ends up doing very little damage. And otherwise, it's a feast of riches. Davis is unsurprisingly great, and I do probably need to emphasise "unsurprisingly"; there's no real sense of discovery in her performance. Her execution of the largely expected beats is fantastic, though, especially when she's letting that Dark Secret quietly strangle her. My actual picks for MVP would go to some ranking of Lynch and Atim, both of whom are superb in taking somewhat insubstantial and one-note roles and making them feel emotionally alive and just as much at the center of the film as the more actively centered roles; even without having a real arc to play, Lynch still ends up managing to create the impression of one, leading to what I, at least, found to be the film's most emotionally successful climax. And in a much smaller role than any of the women, Boyega is terrific, at least on par with his episode of Small Axe in 2020, and just generally making a huge impression with very little screentime and reminding us all what a fantastically promising career it looked like he was going to have before he got Star Warsed in the ass.
Prince-Bythewood assembles all of these performances into an elegantly solid work of filmmaking, doing nothing flashy and doing everything that isn't staging action extremely well. Despite, or I suspect because of its trés-2020s representational politics, The Woman King displays some seriously old school filmmaking chops, showcasing immaculately sturdy work in the costume design by Gersha Phillips and the production design by Akin McKenzie, the kind of well-built physical production that casually invites us into a fully-formed, breathing and organic new world without ever stopping to smash us over the head with world-building. It's the kind of highly polished and professional filmmaking that should not actually be notably impressive, but given the extremely decayed state of American filmmaking in the 2020s, something that feels this confident in displaying its snug craftsmanship without screeching at us to notice it feels outright miraculous. Prince-Bythewood has always had that specific gift for taking extremely well-worn Hollywood formulae and freshening them up not with any gewgaws or gimmickry, but with sheer, almost otherwordly competence, and The Woman King is a top-notch example of how overwhelmingly satisfying it is to a very talented director execute a well-worn but still sturdy formula more or less flawlessly.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
So we have, in other words, a historical action film with some pretty rough action. It has also come under the charge of having some pretty rough history, though that's much less of a bother. I really know nothing at all about the Kingdom of Dahomey, where The Woman King takes place, so I can't really say whether it actually takes a butcher's cleaver to history or not. I assume it probably does, because it is (other than the action thing) a wildly watchable and compelling movie, one of 2022's best popcorn films, and my experience has generally been that movies which are extremely scrupulous about their history mostly aren't very fun or interesting to watch, compared to movies that are more concerned with their own story and settle for "whatever, close enough". The obvious comparison to The Woman King - like, I sort of couldn't get the film out of my head at any point during The Woman King's expansive but never terribly slow 135 minutes - is Braveheart, a surreally bad history lesson that's a rip-snorting violent spectacle that I, for my part, persist in thinking is just a real damn good time at the movies. So whatever it's doing to history, The Woman King is in good company.
The film's story, which comes to us from Maria Bello of all people, alongside Dana Stevens (who eventually wrote the script; absolutely nothing in her rather grim-looking CV implies she had this kind of work in her), centers on a conflict between Dahomey, currently being ruled by the none-too-secure King Ghezo (John Boyega), and the Oyo Empire, which has treated the smaller kingdom as a vassal state. Of late, Dahomey's all-woman army of elite soldiers, the Agojie, has been able to liberate Dahomey slaves from the Oyo, which has brought the unhappiness between the powers to a high boil; just to make things even worse, the Oyo are themselves in the Portuguese sphere of influence, and in 1823 when The Woman King takes place, Portugal was still actively involved in the transatlantic slave trade and wanted no unrest disrupting their efforts in that area. So the war quickly turns into Dahomey - which means, in practice, mostly just the Agojie - versus the Oyo being supported by Portuguese resources. Within that broad canvas, the film touches on a few specific individuals, with the one given the most prominence being General Nanisca (Viola Davis), the head of the Agojie, though the functional role of protagonist is more closely filled by new recruit Nawi (Thuso Mbedu); the "featured" supporting warriors are Izogie (Lashana Lynch) and Amenza (Sheila Atim).
Those four women are the heart of what makes The Woman King such a delight to watch: it has extremely solid old-fashioned craftsmanship. This is old-school epic filmmaking, even if the film's running time doesn't quite bring us into the company of a Proper Epic. But what it's great at is giving us just enough of The Enormous Context Of War, Politics, And God Knows What to feel a sense of grandeur and enormous stakes, while actually situating nearly all of its storytelling in the particular matter of its core characters. That is to say, while The Woman King seems to make the argument that what we should care about is the question of whether Dahomey will be able to shake loose from Oyo oppression, and what this means for the future of the slave trade, in the moment of watching it, what seems much more gripping and important is the far more personal conflict between Nanisca and her opposite number in the Oyo army, General Oba Ade (Jimmy Odukoya). This conflict is not merely rooted in the present, but involves a Dark Secret from the Past which can be pretty much immediately grasped in essentially all particulars, but to its enormous credit, The Woman King obviously realises that we'll have figured it out, so it presents the preservation of the Secret as something more about characters being unwilling to talk to each other because of their own self-protective shells, than because they are setting up a shocking twist.
That is very much where The Woman King triumphs: as a character story. The film is almost entirely without weak performances - the one that I think just does not work is Jordan Bolger's turn as the rather watery and simpering half-Dahomey, half-Portuguese Malik, who ends up serving as Nawi's love interest. But that's not even her main subplot, so he ends up doing very little damage. And otherwise, it's a feast of riches. Davis is unsurprisingly great, and I do probably need to emphasise "unsurprisingly"; there's no real sense of discovery in her performance. Her execution of the largely expected beats is fantastic, though, especially when she's letting that Dark Secret quietly strangle her. My actual picks for MVP would go to some ranking of Lynch and Atim, both of whom are superb in taking somewhat insubstantial and one-note roles and making them feel emotionally alive and just as much at the center of the film as the more actively centered roles; even without having a real arc to play, Lynch still ends up managing to create the impression of one, leading to what I, at least, found to be the film's most emotionally successful climax. And in a much smaller role than any of the women, Boyega is terrific, at least on par with his episode of Small Axe in 2020, and just generally making a huge impression with very little screentime and reminding us all what a fantastically promising career it looked like he was going to have before he got Star Warsed in the ass.
Prince-Bythewood assembles all of these performances into an elegantly solid work of filmmaking, doing nothing flashy and doing everything that isn't staging action extremely well. Despite, or I suspect because of its trés-2020s representational politics, The Woman King displays some seriously old school filmmaking chops, showcasing immaculately sturdy work in the costume design by Gersha Phillips and the production design by Akin McKenzie, the kind of well-built physical production that casually invites us into a fully-formed, breathing and organic new world without ever stopping to smash us over the head with world-building. It's the kind of highly polished and professional filmmaking that should not actually be notably impressive, but given the extremely decayed state of American filmmaking in the 2020s, something that feels this confident in displaying its snug craftsmanship without screeching at us to notice it feels outright miraculous. Prince-Bythewood has always had that specific gift for taking extremely well-worn Hollywood formulae and freshening them up not with any gewgaws or gimmickry, but with sheer, almost otherwordly competence, and The Woman King is a top-notch example of how overwhelmingly satisfying it is to a very talented director execute a well-worn but still sturdy formula more or less flawlessly.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
Categories: action, costume dramas, oscarbait, popcorn movies, war pictures
