Schager begins his review by asking if audiences are ready to forgive Smith, but also dwells on the actor’s “wooden” portrayal of Peter as “both iconic hero and victim.” “Peter is thus closer to an emblem than a fully realized human being, which prevents Smith from getting beneath the character’s traumatized and ferocious exterior,” Schager writes. “ Emancipation is well-intentioned but painfully overwrought,” writes Nick Schager in his review for the Daily Beast. “Perhaps the final showdown with the hated Fassel is anticlimactic, given that it has to come before the third act of Peter’s military enlistment, but this is a strong, fierce, heartfelt movie,” writes Bradshaw. In a four-star review, Bradshaw writes that Smith brings movie-star presence and dignity to a historical figure like Peter and that the movie overall “works very efficiently as a thriller,” although the third act isn’t as strong. The Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw was more effusive in his praise for Emancipation. “The more the movie pulls away from Peter’s perspective, the more it undercuts its own tension,” Chang writes. Justin Chang, writing in the Los Angeles Times, felt that Emancipation failed to do the true story of “Whipped Peter” justice, and he had particular issues with Richardson’s muted cinematography, which he feels was at odds with the survival thriller Fuqua was aiming for. states “saddles films like Antoine Fuqua’s tottering drama…with a considerable burden of responsibility,” but adds that “it’s disappointing when they don’t amount to much more than Oscar bait.” The Hollywood Reporter‘s Lovia Gyarkye writes that Emancipation treats Peter’s escape and journey well, but the film is “hampered by a spare and spiritless screenplay.” Gyarkye feels that the current reality of a growing refusal to confront the horrors of slavery or attempts to rewrite history in some U.S. Cannes Creative Space: Telepool CEO Yoko Higuchi-Zitzmann on Moving Into Production and "More Modest" Box Office Expectations
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