Apologies for the shorter review. I’m just a but busy and there are lots of films out.

Queen (Jodie Turner Smith) and Slim (Daniel Kaluuya) are out on a date which is a bit icy. She didn’t want to be alone as one of her law clients was put on death row. She chose to be with him as he looked sad on his tinder profile. This bad first date ended with him driving her home and them being stopped by the police. It goes down badly and Slim shoots the officer in self defence and suddenly they’re on the run. We follow them from here as they attempt to flee to Cuba and a budding romance ensues.

While being fugitives, they start to discover a network of support for them. While some don’t agree with what happened, they are generally well supported as they become a symbol.

The film is undoubtedly well put together with some good cinematography and tackles a big issue. However, the film was by no means perfect. While neither Turner Smith nor Kaluuya put in a bad performance, the chemistry required wasn’t there. I didn’t believe in the romance they were selling.

There were also pacing issues as some scenes felt slow and didn’t work, although this may be due to said lack of chemistry. There were some good tense scenes, but they were too few and far between and I didn’t feel that we knew the characters well enough by the end.

By the end, I mainly felt underwhelmed. The film wasn’t quite sure whether it wanted to be a political statement or a love against the odds story and failed to be either.

The issues here around police brutality and racism are huge issues which we should talk about, but this was done so much better in other films such as The Hate U Give, Blindspotting and Do The Right Thing.

Summary

Queen and Slim gets some of the basics right, however the two leads lack chemistry and the film never quite seems to know what it wants to be. [Grade: C]