★★★1/2 If you want to take this movie as an action adventure film, you will have fun with the battles, the choreography and some epic breath. Also with the melodramatic part (there are complicated love relationships and a soap opera drama of mother and daughter). Do not look for historical rigor: the heroines who fight against the slave trade here, in real history protected it (Dahomey enslaved neighboring kingdoms and sold captives to the Portuguese). They can also find all the possible woke creed and an African town with a prolixity and architectures that are precursors of Wakanda -and just as existing. Let’s not get sidetracked: as an epic and action film it is very good and Viola Davis is the best possible translation of Rambo to the current imperatives of political correctness. The real merit of the film is that we forget about its “blackwashing” and concentrate on the next adventure scene. Which, by the way, confirms that didacticism is less important than it seems: a film attracts and moves us not because of what it says about the world we live in, but because of those ancient and latent ideas (man -or woman- in danger, the frank struggle, the old tale of David and Goliath, love) engraved in our imaginary memory.
