The Woman King is directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood and stars Viola Davis as Nanisca a top General in an all woman army of African warriors in 19th century West Africa but when a group of French colonisers arrive to take part in the slave trade these warriors must prepare for their toughest battle of all.
The Woman King is a very enjoyable action movie and the main reason for that is down to Prince-Bythewood’s direction and especially her action direction, watching the action scenes in this movie was like a breath of fresh air as they were clean to watch, easy to track who was fighting who and they were properly edited they didn’t have that over reliance of shaky cam editing or overly edited feel that so many action films have done since Paul Greengrass did it first with his 2004 Bourne sequel the Bourne Supremacy, I hope she has more action work coming her way in the future.
Also the film has some good performances, Davis is very effective as Nanisca as she tries to lead her troops while also dealing with some personal issues that come up during the course of the film, Lashana Lynch is very memorable also as one of her key soldiers and between this and No Time to Die I’m liking her on film more and more, John Boyega is also pretty good as the young King and it is welcome to see him in a good role again after Star Wars wasted him so disgracefully and Thuso Mbedu is good as Nawu a young recruit who may be more than she seems.
But there is one thing that did disappoint me and that its overall violence, there is a big part of me that wishes this was MA15+ rated in Australia instead of M rated as I missed seeing the blood and gore and hacked off body parts that you often see with these kinds of films such as Braveheart for example and I wish Prince-Bythewood had gone for a restricted rating version of this film as it would’ve made its already great action scenes even better.
And so that was the Woman King and its very enjoyable for its action and its performances, 3 and a half out of 5.
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