In any other year, the spectacle of a gaunt and grizzled Will Smith headlining a $120 million slavery epic – in which the Hollywood superstar also manages to wrestle an alligator – would feel like an event, a sure-fire swing at Oscars glory come March. But this, of course, has been no ordinary year for the newly minted best actor winner.
By the time the media cycle around The Slap had run its course – rarely has there been so much tiresome, clueless moralising from armchair psychologists – Smith's carefully curated, decades-in-the-making public persona had all but unravelled.
He was expelled from the Academy, and has spent the last nine months apologising in exile.
Smith's new Apple TV+ movie Emancipation, in which he plays a slave who defies his captors to lead a chase across the American South, might not add any new trophies to his collection, but it's a reminder of the one thing that the year's indignities can't take away: He's still a movie star – one of the last of a vanishing breed that can enrich even a lacklustre film.
Looking battered and dusty, with grey-flecked hair and a face pockmarked with scars, Smith plays Peter, a Louisiana slave determined to free himself from the shackles of a railway chain gang upon learning of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.
The character is loosely based on the true story of so-called "Whipped Peter", the subject of the notoriously confronting photograph depicting a slave whose back is a tangled mass of scars – an image that was widely circulated as evidence of the horrors of slavery.
In Training Day director Antoine Fuqua's bleak and brutal movie telling, drawn from a screenplay by William N. Collage (Assassin's Creed), Haitian-born Peter is given – in typical Hollywood fashion – an imagined backstory involving a wife and children on a plantation, an already inhuman existence from which he is ripped away to something impossibly worse. But with Union troops bearing down on his Confederate chain-gang captors, Peter seizes a shovel and the chance to escape – and is soon cutting a path through the Louisiana marshland, with a rapacious tracker (Ben Foster) and his posse in remorseless pursuit.
Shot in an unusual de-saturated style by Quentin Tarantino's go-to cinematographer Robert Richardson (The Hateful Eight; Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood), Emancipation deals in the kind of sombre imagery and heavy historical themes that seem to mark it as a classic piece of awards-hungry, prestige movie making.
But this is also a movie in which Will Smith gets snapped on the butt by an alligator, runs in heroic slow-motion through the forest, and tangles with snakes, vicious dogs, and a white hunter whose sneering villainy arrives straight out of a B-movie.
This lean and lurid genre mode is where Emancipation works best, with Smith growling and grimacing through an unpretentious chase movie that allows his considerable presence to hold an audience in thrall without saying much – and when he does, it's in a pretty good, movie-star approximation of a Haitian accent.
Fuqua, meanwhile, swoops over his subject with drone-mounted cameras and sprints alongside his duelling parties with kinetic tracking shots, his action-movie style creating an uneasy dissonance with harrowing images of heads on stakes and bodies hanging from trees.
Whether or not the film's subject matter lends itself to this kind of adrenaline-charged survivalist action is a debate that will no doubt rage on.
The question is further complicated by notions of who has the right to tell these stories, especially given producer Joey McFarland's bizarre red carpet blunder at the movie's premiere – in which he, a wealthy white man, boasted of owning the original photo of Whipped Peter in his "collection", and promptly fished the image out of his pocket to prove it.
Fuqua seems more attuned to the gung-ho blaxploitation approach favoured by Tarantino in Django Unchained (also shot by Richardson) than he is with interrogating the period's moral complexity, and Emancipation is on less certain footing whenever it takes on conventional historical drama – a subplot involving the plight of Peter's wife (Australian actor Charmaine Bingwa), for example, fails to carry the weight of the protagonist's journey into isolation and fear.
Emancipation, as a result, can often feel adrift between these modes, never fully committing to the adventure movie in which Smith battles beasts and bad guys, nor convincing as a tale of human resilience in the face of historical evil.
The constant – and the reason to watch – is Smith, who manages to hold it all together with the power of that face, which only occasionally shows signs of the famous smirk under the layers of tragedy.
There's a haunted quality to Smith here, betraying the accumulated weight of a career that's crept into many of the star's recent performances – from the patriarch in his Oscar-winning King Richard, who laboured to prove his worth in a culture of doubters, to the eerie post-human assassin of Gemini Man, forced to stare down both professional obsolescence and the spectre of his own youth.
Though Emancipation was filmed last year, it's not hard to watch Smith's performance and see a simmering rage that's about to boil over, the kind of energy that finally exploded, in a heated exchange that led to physical violence, on the Dolby Theatre stage in front of a global audience of millions.
The movie might ring hollow as an exploration of one of American history's darkest chapters, but as a snapshot of Black movie superstardom – and one of its most famous faces – it makes for an often fascinating study.
Emancipation is streaming on Apple TV+.
