“Queen & Slim” manages to grab our attention at its very start as a couple, Queen (Jodie Turner-Smith) and Slim (Daniel Kaluuya), are out on a disastrous first date at a “restaurant”. They talk and politely get to know each other, but she’s already turned off by the fact that he’s decided to take her to a rundown diner on the edge of town. They eventually get into his car, with the notion that after he drives her home they will probably never see each other again.
However, as fate has it, a white cop stops them, but this isn’t your average police officer, this one is very racist. After an over-the-top frisk session on Slim, Queen inexplicably decides to scream at the cop, which leads to a gun being drawn and the racist cop being shot and killed by Queen in self-defense.
This is where the film lost me.
Both of our protagonists decide to run — their decision is frustrating and all-too-facile. Of all the choices they could have made, they picked the worst one. The message that first-time feature-length director Melina Matsoukas seems to want to convey is that the death of a police officer in the hands of any African-American would have the perpetrators standing no chance in the criminal justice system, which is why Queen and Slim are running. I digress, there are multiple instances in the movie where Queen and Slim should have clearly known that the best thing to do was just turn themselves in. Hell, most of the country is on their side as their story goes viral with millions of Americans seeing leaked video footage of the shooting and pleading for their innocence on social media.
Screenwriters Lena Waithe (from “Master of None”) and James Freseem are determined to keep the two lovebirds on the road, no matter what. However, their screenplay is a little too on-the-nose for its own good. They purposely underwrite the back-stories of the two lead characters. And so, despite Kaluuya and Turner-Smith’s talents, we never really get to know their characters well enough to even care about their impending fates.
You can also tell Matsoukas is from the music video world, she just loves to over-stylize her frames. Known for her legendary work on Beyonce music videos, Matsoukas intends to myth-make Queen and Slim —this leads to an overabundance of beautiful imagery from her, but also DP Tat Radcliffe’s insufferable over-lensing. What this film needed was the complete opposite of all that, a subtler approach, with more grit and less gloss. [C-]