The new Michael Bay film reaches for an allegory of slavery, but it’s just a chase picture
By Chris King
Of the St. Louis American
“I have thoughts of him often.”
A sister named Sandra said this about Djimon Hounsou as she waited to interview him last week. Hounsou is the dark, black, smoldering brother from Benin who as Cinque led the uprising in Amistad and played a slave opposite Russell Crowe in Gladiator.
Now, Hounsou has a supporting role in Michael Bay’s new sci-fi action flick, The Island, which opens on Friday, and Sandra was waiting to interview him in a small room. Despite being a seasoned columnist from the land of movies, California, Sandra looked like a star-struck and (let’s be honest) horny fan as she waited for her man.
The Dreamworks officials who arranged this interview as part of a media event in New York should have been encouraged. One of the film’s producers, Walter F. Parkes, said that the current, competitive climate requires that films reach niche audiences to turn a profit. Judging by the surprising number of black journalists it targeted, Dreamworks is gambling that Hounsou’s role, a bit part by Michael Clarke Duncan (The Green Mile) and ferocious action scenes will put some black butts in theater seats to see The Island.
As Sandra waited to interview Hounsou, she had already seen the film, just 48 hours after Bay (whose directing credits include Bad Boys, Armageddon and Pearl Harbor) finished editing the final cut. The film is very much dominated by its two (white) stars, Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson, but Sandra got several good, long looks at her boy, Djimon, as the sisters in the interview session couldn’t resist calling him, just jumping on that first-name intimacy.
Hounsou’s role is crucial to the action of the film.
In a not-too-distant future, human cloning has been developed successfully. Rich folks pay to have themselves cloned so they can have a stockpile of spare body parts. Clients are told their clones are kept in a vegetative state because the script somewhat ridiculously assumes that the rich folks would be too ethical to let living, breathing copies of themselves kept as slaves underground. But that’s exactly what the Merrick Institute is up to, having discovered that vegetative clones don’t develop healthy tissue and organs.
The mental and spiritual development of the clones are suppressed in various ways, and they are kept ignorant of the outside world, which, they are told, is disastrously contaminated. Then McGregor’s character, Lincoln Six-Echo, who already had a worrisome curious streak, follows a bug that somehow got into the controlled facility as it flies back to the above-ground world, setting the stage for his escape, in the company of Jordan Two-Delta, played by the young, talented and gorgeous Johansson.
That’s where Hounsou comes in. He is a former special forces hit-man now working in private service. For all its pretensions as a think-piece about human cloning, The Island is really just a chase picture, and as the man doing the chasing, Hounsou has a fair amount of screen time once the clones are on the run.
It would be unfair to reveal how the chase ends or the dramatic plot twist given to Hounsou’s character. I will say that not one critic who interviewed Hounsou took his character seriously, though Djimon did, or at least pretended to in the spirit of promoting the film.
“I was happy to play an everyday person,” Hounsou said. That, in itself, is remarkable, given that this “everyday person” is a ruthless, top-dollar mercenary. What he really means is he welcomed the break from playing a slave.
“We’re all men,” Hounsou said. “It’s not interesting to always play oppressed characters. I want to play great men who are not slaves.”
That, of course, is the cry for justice made by black actors as long as black men have been acting. It sits a bit awkwardly with The Island, which has a slavery subtext that black audiences should find irritating or revolting. The drones are dehumanized, as blacks were under American slavery, though their humanity proves irrepressible and their attempted liberation is led by characters named Lincoln and Jordan. Get it?
You don’t want it, not the slavery analogy or the corny symbolism. And Djimon Hounsou, bless his heart (Sandra would also bless his face and body), is still looking for the role he deserves, the great man who is not a slave.
But if you are an action-movie junkie, looking for some gut-wrenching chase scenes with spectacular crashes and falls that leave you wondering how in the world nobody was crushed or killed on location, then The Island is for you. As my girl Scarlett Johansson (who had me as nervous as Djimon had Sandra) said, “I love genre films. They do the trick, if they’re good. You’re removed from your life for a couple of hours.”
The Island will remove you from your life for a couple of hours and make your heart pound with its breathtaking action. But, please, look elsewhere for insight into human cloning or, God forbid, slavery.
