Alice

Alice

On this site of ours, my bio says that I love Blaxploitation films. But “Alice” is the worst movie I’ve ever seen, and if it had any affection at all for the genre or female empowerment, it sure didn’t show it in anything past a checklist of what writer/director Krystin Ver Linden thinks are symbols of Blackness. If this movie were a person, it would tell you it voted for Obama twice and has a Black friend; that’s how oversimplified its understanding of race is.

It’s also so paranoid about offending people that it’s almost comical; this is a film where enslaved African-Americans are called “domestics” instead of what you know damn well they were actually called by the plantation owners.

One of those “domestics” even provides the clichéd “hmmmmmmm HMMMMMMMM!” Black lady humming on the soundtrack. We usually don’t get to see this singer onscreen, but she’s always there to underline Black suffering. This time, she’s humming away as she sweeps the porch of the master’s house while a man who tried to escape lies dead in the background, partially blurred so as not to lend any power to the image.

Paul Bennet (Jonny Lee Miller) commands his cook, Alice (Keke Palmer), to look at him: This is what happens when you’re not loyal, he warns her. Bennet has taught Alice how to read so she can read to him every Sunday before he rapes her. Thankfully we’re spared rape scenes.

We do get scenes of Alice being beaten up and dragged around and hogtied to a pole with an awful facial contraption on her head before being released several days later after Bennet has pissed in her face we see that too but Ver Linden gets shy with her camera when Alice shoves a broken piece of glass into her enslaver’s eye before making her escape.

It’s a harbinger that the righteous Black revenge promised by the trailer is going to be deeply unsatisfying. “Alice” isn’t interested in African-American viewers sick of slavery scenes and downtrodden narratives; it’s unwilling to disturb white people who consider themselves racial allies. A movie like this should unapologetically make them uncomfortable. It would have if it were made in the year that it takes place.

If you’ve seen the trailer, you know that Alice’s escape ends with her running into a paved road. The film is 40 minutes old when she nearly gets crushed by a truck driven by Frank (Common). The scene is so poorly filmed that any shock of Alice suddenly discovering an expressway during slavery times is lost. Frank reacts to Alice like no person would: Here’s this bloodied woman, dressed like Kizzy from “Roots” and freaking out because she’s never been in a truck before; she doesn’t even know what year it is and she pukes on his seats. He doesn’t bat an eye: maybe she has amnesia, he figures.

This results in a hilarious emergency room scene featuring an incompetent cameo from a B-movie blonde nurse who would be at home in a Roger Corman production. She diagnoses Alice with 72 hours of psychiatric evaluation before Frank helps her escape. “They’ll drill holes in your brain!” he warns her.

The two leads have zero chemistry, and are saddled with such atrocious dialogue that you feel for them. Palmer gives it a game, respectable try, but Common turns in the worst work of his career. At first I thought they both looked like they’d been drugged and forced to appear in this movie. Then I saw that they were the producers.

Every single scene in “Alice” raises questions that decimate one’s suspension of disbelief. Ver Linden’s inability to build either section of the film’s universe dooms the movie. She strands her actors, never once allowing them three dimensions nor anything resembling common sense. The modern day slavery angle is not only unexplained but a ripoff of “Antebellum.” That film was far worse but also more believable. And that’s the movie with the slavery amusement park! An opening title says “Alice” is “inspired by true events,” that catch-all phrase which gets dragged out when the filmmakers want you to buy some unsellable nonsense.

The Blaxploitation-inspired second half is exponentially worse than the first. Alice finds Frank’s memory box, revealing that he was once a Black Panther. She also finds all these books on Black empowerment, which she reads as fast as Johnny Five, the speed-reading robot from “Short Circuit.” While she gets educated, we see clips of Malcolm X and Angela Davis because those are still pretty much shorthand for Black liberation for people who don’t know any better (read: white folks).

They’re shown out of context and therefore serve no purpose other than fetishistic lip service to revolutionaries. In one afternoon, Alice becomes radicalized and, after freaking out over the telephone’s busy signal, becomes an expert at dialing every name in the phone book that sounds like her oppressors. Fortunately for her, racists who are hiding Black people and using them as slaves have listed numbers.

She also finds magazines with Pam Grier and Diana Ross on the covers. She gets inspired to give herself a fantastic, enviable Afro not by Ebony or Jet Magazine but by Rolling Stone. While Frank takes her to see “Coffy,” she decides to head back to the plantation to get some revenge. Meanwhile wah-wah guitar, Stevie Wonder and old soul protest songs blare on the soundtrack, doing everything they can to convince us we’re watching a Blaxploitation movie. Not even a genius like Stevie can pull that off.

At long last Alice returns from wherever she’s been for what seems like an eternity to face Bennet. I won’t spoil anything about the climax other than Coffy, Foxy Brown and Cleo Jones would all be more ruthless than Alice is here. Despite seeing a Blaxploitation film before she started this whole quest thing, she learned nothing about how they work nor what they’re about at all. The makers of this worthless piece of trash didn’t learn that either.

Watch Alice For Free On Gomovies.