Jan 25, 2020
See kids, this is why you shouldn't use Tinder - you might end up shooting a police officer in self-defense on the way home if the date doesn't go well. It's ironic too that this was the movie we watched before hand. With that said, please put any "Bonnie and Clyde" notions out of you mind even though that may be the single point of reference in just about every promotional write up and review of QUEEN & SLIM thus far. Bonnie and Clyde robbed banks and murdered people while Queen and Slim defended themselves against an authoritarian goon who assaulted them in an illegal traffic stop, forcing them to go on the lam for fear of reprisal from a corrupt police system that has historically been a tool of racial and class oppression. With that aside, I'm hesitant to call QUEEN & SLIM an outright crime drama. It's a romance film first and a road trip movie second, but there happens to be an inciting incident that could be misconstrued as a crime by anyone who enjoys the taste of fresh leather footwear.
As this ill-fated date turns into a race to escape the long arm of the law, Jodie Turner-Smith and Daniel Kaluuya wrestle with their faith, societal perspectives, music tastes, hopes, dreams, personal history, cultural history, other people's perceptions of them, and each other as they come to terms with the dark reality that faces them and learn to appreciate the bits of life they had taken for granted. The film often stops to remind us that the stupidity of youth doesn't solely lie in making wrong bad decisions because sometimes bad decisions are the most worthwhile. At first I found myself scratching my head at why the runaways would stop at a bar for a dance and a drink or detour to a cemetary to visit a loved one's grave when cops are hot on their trail, but in this hyper-real fantasy, the filmmakes brazenly refuse to fall prey to the conventions of such a scenario. These people want to live in love, not live in fear, and there are plenty of other films that shove the latter down our throats.
There's also quite a bit of humor in the surrounding characters. The dialog with everyone they run into doesn't languish in existentialism or wallow in their misfortune. Queen's uncle is an echo of Dolemite himself, but he's an Iraq war veteran too. It's easy to forget in some movies that other humans aren't just characters. Real humans are much more complicated, and these subtleties can and will touch the surface in a good film. As far as the socio-political statements that this shares with BLINDSPOTTING, THE HATE U GIVE, and IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK, it's there, but I can't help but feel that this is less a biting critique of America's racial unrest as it is a complex celebration of modern Blackness in all of its glory and tragedy. Needless to say, QUEEN & SLIM is casually one of the coolest films this year.
Verified