Will Smith’s ‘Emancipation’ Met With Mixed Reviews Ahead Of Critical Theatrical Opening

The New York Times wrote Emancipation “functions as a necessary corrective to the familiar, big-screen fictions about the American slave trade,” though it’s also “very much a propulsive, Hollywood-style action-fueled adventure.”

The film “treats the details of Peter’s journey with respect and great admiration,” but “feels flimsy when it strays from the swamps, rendering the politics of the time as almost secondary to the visual spectacle of a harrowing escape,” critiqued the Hollywood Reporter.

Variety noted that director Antoine Fuqua’s point was clear: “Whatever you’ve heard about slavery can’t compare to witnessing it”; Still, when Emancipation leans in to being an “adventure-style survival saga,” it “seems reluctant to entertain at times, despite a host of B-movie contrivances.”

Fuqua “seems vaguely torn between his usual flair for bone-crunching violence… and the desire to forge something more artful and historically resonant from Peter’s experience,” wrote the Los Angeles Times, saying the film “fall[s] short of the history that inspired it.”

The Associated Press said Emancipation is clearly an “action thriller” and “a straightforward parable of Black resistance and spiritual perseverance,” making it “distinct from many recent big-screen treatments of slavery and also more shallow.”

Deadline writer Valerie Complex said that she thought of walking out of Emancipation several times because “seeing so much Black death onscreen is exhausting and painful,” writing “the story of ‘Whipped Peter’ and the impact he had on the culture of war and American slavery live on to this day, but there has to be another way to tell these stories.”