REVIEW: WILL SMITH-LED 'EMANCIPATION' IS AN ACTION THRILLER

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.

Fuqua, a maker of muscular genre movies, has crafted something with less in common than an acutely piercing drama like "12 Years a Slave," and instead made a film more akin to a gritty, survival actioner — a chase movie that takes its potency less from psychological realism than a brutal B-movie construction. Immersed in the desperate but cunning escape of Peter (Smith), "Emancipation" is a straightforward parable of Black resistance and spiritual perseverance.

That approach makes "Emancipation," which debuted Friday in theaters and premieres Dec. 9 on Apple TV+, something distinct from many recent big-screen treatments of slavery and also more shallow. Fuqua's film is often harrowing and gripping but also less nuanced and too narrowly confined in genre conventions than its real-life protagonist deserves.

Peter, whose name was Gordon according to many accounts, was a pivotal historical figure but also a little-known one. In March 1863, he escaped from a Louisiana plantation. Ten days later, after a more than 40-mile flight, he reached the Union army stationed in Baton Rouge.