This revisionist pamphlet fantasy/drama/revenge thriller was the worst thing I’ve managed to finish in a while. Almost from start to finish, Krystin Ver Linden’s debut film, miraculously premiered at Sundance, was painfully irritating, bizarre and completely pointless. Thematically, “Alice” follows films such as the recent horror film “Antebellum” in which the main character found herself simultaneously in the slave-owning South and in the present, and this was a real dud. In the first half hour, “Alice” seems like a film in the vein of “12 Years a Slave”, another tragic story about the fate of slaves in the American South on the eve of the Civil War. However, sometime after half an hour, Alice escapes from the plantation and runs through the forest – straight to the highway, in 1973.
And this is where complete chaos and idiocy begins. A day or two after she’s done ripping off anything and everything, Alice goes from a barely literate slave to an Afro-haired vigilante after watching the blacksploatation film “Coffy” with Pam Grier at the theater with the trucker who gave her refuge. She then reads a few more books about the struggle for human rights in the sixties, sees who Malcolm X or Martin Luther King are and is ready to return to the plantation and deal with that stereotypical plantation cracker and slave owner from the South Bennett (Johnny Lee Miller). Somehow this all seemed to me like a bizarre version of that old French movie “Distant Cousins” when Jean Reno and Christian Clavier end up in the present. It’s just that “Alice” is completely devoid of humor and it’s really hard to figure out what Ms. Ver Linden’s intention was.
Well, it’s not hard to figure out. She probably also wanted to get on the train that has been riding for some time on the topic of black suffering, systemic racism in America and all that legacy of slavery that has been widely discussed on the other side of the Atlantic for some time. However, unlike many modern blacksploitation, revisionist films that made sense, this bizarre revenge fantasy was criminally bad, painfully boring and not even a lick of fun, at least humorous or at least cynical. This terrible film was made in which absolutely nothing worked the way the author probably imagined, with all possible stereotypes, and I think that “Alice” should be a guide to how such problematic, symbolic films in which the present and the past and struggle are mixed should not look like. of African Americans for equality and equity.