A little too black and white and red all over

Rating: 3/10 (16 February 2014)

Making a movie about a Hollocaust is a surefire way to have your movie labeled a classic. Be it about the destruction of the native American nations and theft of their land, the murder of the European Jews or the enslavement of millions of Africans movies about how awful things can be real award winners. The gravity of the evil injustice is enough to catapult a mediocre script and production into an award winning epic. Even if the movie is not very good.
The plot of this film is that slavery is bad. No really, its really bad. We have to tell you that it was bad. Very bad. Awful, in fact! This film reminds me of another stinker, called "The Boost". In that movie the lesson was that drugs are bad. Really bad. Incredibly bad. In case you missed it, drugs are not good. By the first 20 minutes I got it. Slavery was no fun at all.
Here's the plot: Solomon Northrop (Chietel Ejiofor) is a free black man living an idyllic life in 1841 New York. He is gullible as heck and agrees to go with 2 slavers to Washington where slavery is legal. It never occurs to him that even free black men should watch themselves in slave country. After being plied with liquor, he wakes up in chains. He then has to work and get beaten for 12 years. Boy I didn't know slavery was bad until this movie. (sarcasim) There really is no plot just a lot of beatings.
What I found interesting was that white people in New York were delighted to meet black people. They were welcome into stores and parties and taken on trips. White people in the south were uniformly evil. They would beat a black person nearly to death just for getting a bar of soap. (Except for Brad Pitt, but he was the Producer.) They didn't really work their plantations so much as use them as platforms for the torture.
I give it a 3, It was an effort to show a horrible institution that can never be forgotten. But I didn't think it was all good versus all evil. I don't believe 1840s New Yorkers behave like white delegated to the Democratic Convention, nor do I believe that all Southerners were 100% vicious all the time. Yes Slavery was bad. I got it.