Queen & Slim: Vigilante Road Movie Too Illogical to Drive Home its Point

By Kim Hughes

Rating: B-

Queen & Slim, the feature directorial debut from video and commercial director Melina Matsoukas, is the kind of film you really want to like, given its torn-from-the-headlines story of systemic police violence against the black community and its screenplay by Lena Waithe with James Frey.

And there’s reason to recommend it, not least the persuasive, committed performances from leads Daniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith who are very easy on the eyes, particularly in a sex scene that’s a fantasy for the ages.

But despite its virtues and intriguingly complicated morality, Queen & Slim never rises above its initial premise which is so not credible that it hoovers all ensuing tension from the rest of the film. Ridiculous can’t sustain a two hour–plus running time, and the stronger the filmmakers stick with their fire-breathing idea, the more frustrating Queen & Slim becomes, stomping out any connection to a reality most of us would recognize.

It starts out well enough. Kaluuya and Turner-Smith are on a first date. The chemistry is negligible, but a friendly drive home is in the cards. On route, the pair are stopped by an abusive white cop who needlessly escalates the situation and ends up dead.

With zero discussion about the long-term outcome of their actions — and despite one being a lawyer and the other so pious he doesn’t drink and his licence plate reads “TrustGod” — the pair spontaneously decide to abandon their entire lives and their families in Cleveland and go on the run. No thought about jobs or being fugitives or ensuing consequences. Or the fact that they are basically strangers with zero chemistry. They just go.

So much for torn from the headlines; torn from a video game is more like it. The idea that opposites invariably attract in dire circumstances also asks us to set aside a whole other set of questions about the reality of desirability.

Anyway, they’re off. They’ll go to New Orleans, where Queen’s uncle lives! By the time they reach Kentucky, they have added kidnapping and grand theft to their rap sheet but they conduct all with such doe-eyed earnestness that we know they are just panicked, not evil. Evil people don’t drive injured strangers to hospitals despite being pressed for time and on the run, right? Mickey and Mallory they are not.

As the pair penetrate deeper underground, it becomes clear the broader black community, who witnessed the initial cop-shooting incident via dashcam video gone viral, will offer the fugitives peace and protection. That could have been an interesting premise to flesh out, but there are just so many ludicrous plot holes and red herrings to chase in Queen & Slim that that never happens.

To wit: Slim’s upstanding father is surrounded by police in his home; we learn this when Slim calls to tell dad he is OK despite the risk of capture. Yet Queen’s uncle, a convict running a brothel in New Orleans with a highly publicized connection to his niece, is not visited by the cops until a neighbour calls in an overheard and unrelated domestic argument.

As they head towards Florida, where they hope to escape to Cuba, Queen and Slim (names never uttered in the film, by the way) stay with a war buddy of Queen’s uncle who conveniently has a trap door under his bed for when the SWAT teams raids the house. As one does.

Another distracting arc finds a child who befriends the pair swept up in a protest and killing a cop. And then… nothing. The plot development dead-ends without any further work-through apart from mention that the two have become folk heroes of a sort, and that the act is some kind of warped homage.

The marketing machine behind Queen & Slim is pitching the movie as a kind of Bonnie and Clyde meets Thelma and Louise but it’s neither. The film refuses to cast its leads as bad (possibly knuckleheaded) which pre-empts the former. And the pair are the architects of their own misfortune rather than largely blameless conduits of bad luck, which precludes the latter.

The film’s operatic ending, while consistent with the on-the-nose tone of what has come before, underscores the fact that Queen & Slim is really just a placard come to life, not a meaningful dive into current events.

Queen & Slim. Directed by Melina Matsoukas. Written by Lena Waithe with James Frey. Starring Daniel Kaluuya, Jodie Turner-Smith, Chloë Sevigny, and Sturgill Simpson. Opens wide November 27.