AMISTAD (42)

Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Starring: Djimon Hounsou, Matthew McConaughey, Anthony Hopkins, Morgan Freeman

The Pitch: Rebellious slaves aboard a 19th-century transport ship are caught, and put on trial for murder.

Theo Sez: Speeches, epiphanies, tribulations, heavenly choirs, three (count 'em) trials and a gaggle of British actors - Hopkins, Pete Postlethwaite, Jeremy Northam - arguing the finer points of the American Constitution : white guilt gets a pretty definitive seeing-to in this turgid epic, hugely overblown in this director's trademark style though also featuring some superb visuals - mostly in the opening half-hour, doing breathtaking things with mist-filtered light, the glint of a sword or the hugeness of the night sky (one shot especially - the African families huddled on deck in their robes and head-dresses, absolutely still and craning out into the mist - is so perfectly composed you half-expect it to be on sale in the foyer as you go out). The rest is a sorry sight, not always as giggle-inducingly silly as its infamous "Give us free" sequence (it's the build-up that makes it so hilarious, all that escalating paranoia toppling over into bathos), but still sobering evidence of how you can only talk about certain things in Hollywood movies if you reduce them to meaningless abstractions. The film objectifies its slave "heroes" right from the opening shot of a strange glimmering something that looks like a hunk of ebony but turns out to be a black man - they're sculpted against the light, not even subtitled when they speak : mysterious and unknowable, ineffably Other (which, no doubt, is the only way to pre-empt lobbying by African-American groups - you can't be accused of stereotyping if you don't actually say anything). The plotting is as diffuse as the characters, endlessly dragging out a fairly simple case (our heroes' lawyer summarises the legal issues involved in just a couple of sentences) ; everything - even the relatively good stuff, like the southern Senator's silky-voiced threats - goes on too long ; leaden Messages are declaimed, never debated ("the natural state of Man is freedom," croaks Hopkins in the climactic speech - though it's at least arguable that Man only became human when he started to relinquish freedom). It's a veritable sea-storm of portentousness ; the actors - Freeman in a nothing part, Hopkins shuffling and squinting, McConaughey in a get-up that makes him look like the Artful Dodger - go down with the ship.