135 min | PG-13 | September 16, 2022 | TriStar Pictures
In 1820s West Africa, the all-female Agojie warriors guard the Kingdom of Dahomey against rival empires and European slavers. Viola Davis trains a new generation to fight while the kingdom grows rich on the trade it claims to resist. The action is sharp. The history gets sanded smooth.
The Woman King follows the Agojie, the women warriors of the Kingdom of Dahomey, in 1823. General Nanisca trains young recruits to defend the kingdom against the Oyo Empire and the European slave trade. King Ghezo rules a nation whose economy runs on selling captives to Portuguese traders. The film stages itself as a triumphant origin story of Black women fighters. Underneath that surface sits a story about a kingdom that profits from the same slave trade it claims to oppose. The screenplay wants both versions and commits fully to neither.
Viola Davis plays Nanisca as a soldier who carries old wounds into every battle. She moves through the training scenes with physical authority and lets the trauma surface only in private. Thuso Mbedu plays Nawi, the defiant recruit, with a stubbornness that reads as both strength and recklessness. Lashana Lynch plays Izogie with humor and swagger that make her the warmest presence in the unit. Sheila Atim plays Amenza, Nanisca’s confidant, with quiet gravity. John Boyega plays King Ghezo as a ruler who enjoys his power and avoids its moral cost.
Gina Prince-Bythewood directs the battle sequences with a clarity that most action films lack. She keeps the geography of each fight legible and shoots the Agojie in wide frames that show the choreography instead of burying it in cuts. The combat favors blades and grappling over gunfire, and the editing holds shots long enough to register every impact. Dana Stevens wrote the screenplay from a story she developed with Maria Bello. The script delivers the rousing speeches and the training montages with confidence. It loses its nerve when the plot reaches the kingdom’s reliance on selling human beings.
The Woman King works as large-scale studio filmmaking built around faces Hollywood rarely centers. The action is real and the cast commits to every frame. The problem is the gap between the film’s politics and its history. Dahomey sold captives to Europeans for generations, and the script turns that fact into a subplot the heroes resolve through good intentions. The film wants to celebrate resistance to slavery while softening its protagonists’ part in it. The result entertains without earning the moral weight it reaches for.