Wonderful Historic Drama Lacks Punch

Rating: 8/10 (11 July 1999)

What a great story, and its true! Newly captured slaves violently commandeer their slave ship and force the surviving crew to return them to Africa, but are tricked into landing in New England instead. It's 1839 and the US is slowly sliding into Civil War. The trial of the slave mutineers galvinizes the politicians, Abolitionists, and of course the lawyers.
Spielberg collects a great cast of actors, most notably Anthony Hopkins as an aging John Quincy Adams, and Mathew McConaughy as the African's lawyer. The painstaking attention to historical detail transports the viewer back to this time, when America had one last chance to escape the nightmare of the Civil War, and was blowing it.
Then why does the movie lack punch, and why was I so aware of the long length of the movie? I can't really say actually. The mutiny scene that opens the movie jolts and pulls you head first into the story. But then the movie hits the breaks, and slows through recreations of the three trials to which the Africans were subjected. The plodding pace loosens the films grip established so well in the beginning, and in only a few scenes, one of them being Hopkins summation to the Supreme Court at the end of the film, does it regain its dramatic punch.
Still a very good movie, but one expects more from Mr. Spielberg.