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.

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.

Just came back from seeing The Woman King and, sadly, it's a disappointment: slow, corny, diffused. Instead of exploring the roots and formation of the Dahomey Amazons, it follows the cliched template of military recruit training film: bring together trainees from divergent backgrounds, always including one who is a born leader but arrogant and reckless. Their leader is a tough taskmaster, played by the glowering, no-nonsense Viola Davis. Add in some soap opera elements: dark secrets from the past and a forbidden romance. Add two subplots--about slave traders on the Coast and a royal skullduggery, and pour onto the screen. There ARE several good fight scenes. But for the rest, it may as well be Drill Sgt RIchard Widmark in Take the High Ground.an.

Would have loved the story if they told it more historically accurate. It's clear the writing is lazy and the reason is likely because they hired lazy people. Think about it.. they hired people to tell a story that already exists but they didn't want to tell the real story because that was too difficult so all they got were lazy writers. Learn the real story and you'll discover it's all lies. She was a slave holder herself - owned more slaves than most Americans. The writers went out of their way to not only ignore this fact but turn the movie into propaganda by suggesting she was anti-slave. So the movie is just a scheme.... don't watch it.

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.