With her rousing new action-drama, "The Woman King," director Gina Prince-Bythewood suggests that, in at least one crucial respect, the West African kingdom of Dahomey was more ahead of its time than that starry imperialist empire called Hollywood. An early 19th-century epic awash in militaristic might and colonial oppression, the movie burnishes the truth and the legend of the Agojie, an all-female regiment of warriors who fought for Dahomey with great ferocity, unapologetic bloodlust and selfless abandon. And the most ferocious among them, at least in this swift and satisfying telling, was their top general, Nanisca, played by Viola Davis in the first major action showcase of her career.
That's a remarkable accomplishment if also a revealing one, and it speaks less to any heretofore uncharted depths of Davis' talent than to the limits of the film industry's imagination. While her smarts and gravitas have always made her a natural fit for authority figures (she can do cunning government heavies in her sleep), it has seldom fallen to Davis to play the fearsome warrior. Or, as we see in "The Woman King's" cut-to-the-quick opening scene, to rise silently from the grasses, sword out, midriff bared, shoulders agleam with sweat and firelight. Her enemies are the gun-wielding, horse-riding male soldiers of the Oyo Empire, who quickly set the stakes in a picture that aspires to the grandly epic scale of "Braveheart," "Gladiator" and "The Last of the Mohicans."
If "The Woman King" doesn't always match the visceral intensity of those pictures — Prince-Bythewood, a skillful director of action, keeps the carnage to a PG-13 minimum — it nonetheless rises to the challenge of using an old-fashioned template to deliver a floodtide of exhilarating new images. To watch the Agojie warriors storm into battle, armed with swords and spears and led by Nanisca's mighty ululating battle cry, is to encounter much more than the standard Hollywood vision of resistance in action. And before long, the Agojie's ranks are fortified by a fresh batch of recruits, some of whom are refugees from neighboring realms and some of whom, like a stubborn teenager named Nawi (an outstanding Thuso Mbedu), have been disowned and deposited at the palace gates by their fed-up families.
