She's here to lop off heads and chew bubble gum,
and she's all out of bubble gum
dir: Gina Prince-Bythewood
2022
The Woman King is based on a somewhat true story, in that there was a place called Dahomey in West Africa, and there was an all female fighting force called the Agojie, and they fought and won a war against the larger Oyo empire that treated Dahomey as a vassal state.
Oh, and there was a king called Ghezo (John Boyega) who ruled for 40 years.
The rest, as they say, is not history, but fiction. The stirring portrayal of General Nanisca, as leader of the Agojie, is an entirely created character.
Also fictional is the idea that Ghezo, at Nanisca’s urging, stopped selling captives as slaves.
I knew all this going in, but it really didn’t adversely impact on my enjoyment of the flick. Same way that no-one really spends any quality time in conversation pointing out that nothing in Gladiator was historically accurate, or even made any sense. They just liked it when Russell Crowe in his prime was killing motherfuckers dead in the Coliseum.
In that same spirit, the primary attraction of this here flick is that Viola Davis, Academy Award winner Viola Davis, kills a lot of motherfuckers dead in this film, and they all have it coming. Anyone who knows who Viola Davis is knows how cold and mean she can be in a role (her version of Amanda Waller in several DC films including the most recent Black Adam would probably shoot a child in order to somehow get a good cup of coffee), and this is her at her most steely-eyed.
She is such a huge presence in the flick that whenever she wasn’t on screen I was a bit nervous. But she is by no means the only character of note. John Boyega’s role is quite minor, and he plays it quite minorly (and comically, I would argue). It’s strange that this royal personage, someone with supreme power and a massive harem knows that Nanisca could fuck him up at a moment’s notice, so he always has to seem deferential to her. Though she is loyal at all times, she carries herself with an air of “I could eat your face in an instant and no-one would stop me”.
I did wonder at some points why she didn’t kill him and take his place.
I mean, this is fiction after all. If anyone needed their head cut off more than this jerk. Speaking of which, there are a lot of people whose heads need to be separated from their shoulders, and it’s Nanisca’s job to find young, powerful women, train them, and send them forth to do the king’s (really her) bidding.
One such young woman, rejecting some terrible guy her father is trying to sell her to, is dumped on the Agojie’s doorstep. Nawi (Thuso Mbedu) seems impossibly young and impossibly little, but she has a real fire in her belly, and a strong desire to help the people around her, sometimes to her own detriment. Nanisca has no time for her undisciplined ways, but her best friend (maybe I read a bit too much into that, but to me they were definitely a couple) Izogie (Lashana Lynch) takes Nawi under her wing and shows her the ropes, the knives, all the stuff they use to be awesome legends on the battlefield.
I am told, or at least Wikipedia assures me that the Agojie existed, and I have no reason to doubt that. And so they were respected and feared, so they must have been doing something right. They were a personal bodyguard to the king, and they fought many a battle. This was in the 1600s to the 1800s, so it would make sense that Europeans would call them Amazons.
And like the Amazons of myth, and the Amazons of Wonder Woman, these women live apart from men, take no husbands, have no children, but train all the time. There’s a lot of dancing as well, but that’s as precise and exacting as the military training.
Nanisca clearly does not miss the attention or the company of men, but Nawi hasn’t really committed to this weird life of chastity or at least no dicks. The other women, well, they seem very happy in the company of other women, and who can blame them?
The tensions arise between Dahomey and Oyo, between Nanisca and Ghezo, who she keeps trying to convince to give up slaving, and to focus on palm oil (jesus fucking christ, palm oil?) as a way of being mega-rich. The problem is that the kingdom of Oyo really, really likes kidnapping people and selling them to the Europeans. At this stage it’s the Brazilians who control the trade, and two of them seem to be happy to keep shipping slaves to the so called New World for as long as they can.
One of these jerks, though, is half-Dahomeyan, and even worse, is very, very handsome. So handsome in fact is Malik (Jordan Bolger) that Nawi seems smitten with him.
That’s ever so soap operaish, in a flick which generally avoids that bullshit. Though, to be honest, there’s another big twist that is so soap opera-ish that I gagged when it was revealed. I can think of 14 better ways that they could have done that reveal, but, ye gods, they went with this one (bleurgh).
I could have done less with the soap opera bullshit, none of which I’m spoiling directly, and more of these awesome fighters being awesome. You may think there are lots of battle scenes, or that this is an action flick, but it’s mostly not. Apart from the fights at the beginning and the end, mostly it’s talking, training and emoting, all of which I liked.
Davis is such a compelling actor that I would literally listen to her reading out a law textbook for hours, which was the basis of that tv show she was in called How to Get Away with Murder. She gives almost every line reading so much emphasis and grim feeling that she’s pretty much even more furious and lethal when she isn’t killing people. And yes she dominates the movie, but the rest of the (female) cast shine wonderfully as well.
Thuso Mbedu looks so young and vulnerable, but she has a fierceness that transcends her size. She is phenomenal in this role, even if it is that role of newbie / audience substitute who’s there to have obvious things explained to her. Lashana Lynch might not be a household name yet, but she was great in that last James Bond film where she became the new 007, and she’s great here too. She is far more supportive of Nawi than Nanisca could ever be, having closed herself off to all human emotions except for RAGE.
Another actor I really liked in the movie was Sheila Atim, another Agojie warrior fiercely loyal to Nanisca, but also to her sisters-in-arms, choosing them and Nawi over their supposed duty to the king. Or to Nanisca, who sometimes seems like she’d let all of them die as long as it means she gets revenge on the bastard who tormented her many years ago, who coincidentally appears to be the general for the Oyo forces, being Oba (Jimmy Odukoya).
He looks a bit like the pirate Blackbeard, that’s mostly what I remember.
I guess I’m a bit of a sucker for stories like these. I feel like some of us were pre-programmed to think these woman warriors were the bee’s knees after the depiction of the Dora Milaje in the Black Panther comics especially, but also the films. It’s pretty clear that the writers were “inspired” by the history of the Agojie represented here. Plus I wonder if, considering how long this flick was in development hell for, the success of the Black Panther movie paved the way for this here, with producers being able to say “it’s just like the Wakanda warrior queens with the shaved heads and the total commitment to being awesome all the time, like that time Okoye fucks up that luxury sports car in Seoul using only her spear!”
Yes, I am a nerd, did you just notice? Davis maybe wouldn’t have worked as the head of the Dora Milaje in a comic book film, but she nails down everything that needs nailing down in a flick that tries to be more grounded as well as a complete fantasy about history and stuff and attractive Brazilian slave trader hotties.
She didn’t really end the Transatlantic slave trade, but, hey, we can dream, can’t we?
7 ways in which this was solid work all round, thanks everybody, good job out of 10
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“Your tears mean nothing. To be a warrior, you must kill your tears.” – that’s not very supportive, General Nanisca - The Woman King
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