Empty and hypocritical

Rating: 2/10 (23 February 2014)

I was shocked with this film. I ended up wondering what on earth the director had in mind when he was making the film? The sad thing is that the subject of the film is extremely interesting but the director lost all chances of making this a great film.
Slavery in America is a huge issue indeed and I do understand that the Caucasian people in the US still try to deal with the issue. And most of them feel guilt. It is more or less how most Germans feel for the atrocities that Hitler has done. BUT someone expects that a film on slavery from an acclaimed director will either go into the core of the problem and prompt you to learn and understand things or will present a human story in a way that can create a case for the issue.
This film is doing nothing. It wastes 134 minutes to tell a story that could be told in no more than 15 minutes. When you have a 15 minutes storytelling then you need either to focus on building a characters' film or to insert in the storytelling questions that the viewer should consider. But instead of this the film is wasting all the good actors in an endless cycle of the same idea: "what cruelty humans could cause to humans"!. But we DO KNOW this and we've seen it many times. Please make a point! The most hypocritical scene of the film is the Patsey's whip. Until that scene the film was boring, with this scene it became hypocritical because at that point I think that the director thought: "I can not do a film about slavery without showing a cruel scene; I've forgotten to do this so far, so I do it now"! I learn nothing from the film and I didn't entertain myself at all. I am wondering why all cinema critics have given such victorious reviews. I am sorry to say that I think that the film tries to capitalize on the "white people's guilty" and the director has blackmailed the audience by saying: "If you do not like it the film then you are just like the bad whites that they have done these things to the slaves". I am sorry Mr. director, this is not the case, YOU have exploited the issue of slavery to put money in your pocket. You have succeeded and congratulations on the marketing success, but this is a bad film and will remain like this!