Queen & Slim is the ultimate bait and switch. You go in thinking it’s going to be a smart romantic action movie with a heart of gold and two fish out of water, playing at being thugs, but it’s actually a shallow, spineless romcom made to trick hipster trash like myself into a theater for 90 minutes.
Writing this movie a little over a month after viewing (in Jan), but in some ways the disappointment of it is still fresh on my mind. I’ve actually hardened against this movie with time, like an old crone, stuck in the attic of her home, recounting the past wrongs done to her, reliving an old love, and scratching the scab of time off my wounds to keep them moist and redolent.
The trailer for this movie is probably the best thing about this movie. There were moments while watching this film when I thought about how brave the filmmakers were to have included scenes so close to the end, but actually, I think it shows that there was an excellent concept here that never really got off the ground and then needed to be padded with moody travel montages and a weird pimp uncle scene that feels like something out of the stereotypes of the 80s.
Look, I know this film isn’t for me and that there are certain cultural aspects of this movie are going to go unappreciated by my limited experiences, but my disappointment really stems from the fact that I really felt like this movie was supposed to be for me–in the same way that Good Times was made to make white people feel comfortable with black families on television and The Jeffersons. Queen and Slim felt like some edge lord hipster shit, like I was going to be able to nod sagely at my friends about having seen the reluctant cop killer movie, drop some knowledge about systemic racism, and the good work Daniel Kaluuya has been doing the past couple years (esp with that rad character work he did as the villain from that one Matthew McConaughey movie).
The trailer took me in. It nourished my soul and whenever it came up back-to-back with Black and Blue, I always always looked around at which other couples were nodding their heads along and giving the thumbs up. Queen & Slim was going to be my line in the sand. Look at that trailer. Tell me it’s not smooth. Tell me you are not charmed.
The thing is this film is empty calories. It is light and crispy and looks gorgeous when you hold it up to the light, it even photographs well, but when you bite into it and give it a chew, it rots your teeth and goes for your brain. Linda Holmes in her review of Akwafina’s new show (I just lost 95% of my audience right here) talked about this double-standard that we hold “creators of color” to: “There’s a lot of pressure on creators of color to be groundbreaking — to sell their shows as both good and somehow ethically nutritious.” And I think that’s relevant to the discussion. To what extent is it interesting to have black Bonnie and Clyde in 2020? Does the cultural translation do enough to carry the film or is more warranted?
This is Friend’s reason for not feeling the urge to see Bad Boys 2 this weekend or ever: he’s not interested in revisiting the mindless action movies of the 90s. It’s the reason why Leon Bridges got so much shit when his first albums came out. We have moved on and we require acknowledgement of that cultural-poetic anxiety. This movie feels unresolved for me, but I would say that the movie is thin on common sense and doesn’t add very much to the genre.
Things that bothered: the “twist,” if you can call it one, is One Hell of a Sting, involves so much fucking greedy backstabbing after the sloppiest getaways. Issues like gas money stopped mattering when they no longer needed to matter anymore. Considering how much of the film hinged on the singularly evil nature of one cop, there were a whole bunch of cops helping these two cop killers at every step of the journey. Friend’s hot take at the end of this movie was, “I demand more endings!” There were at least four places the movie could have ended before the jello they threw at the wall at the end. The couple’s ability to navigate toward the Florida without GPS made me really question my directional abilities, and, coincidentally, constituted the first time anyone has ever willingly chosen Florida as a destination before (please send me hate mail).
