Parker is not as good at capturing the mesmerizing preacher that history tells us Turner was. His urgent pleas go unheeded as his owner is peer-pressured into letting visitors enjoy the forced sexual favors of slave women. Parker does better at suggesting the shell shock Nat seems to wear as his lot in life. He can “help folks get their slaves to calm down a bit” with his lay sermons about obedience, “God’s will” and such.Īnd so he does, until the horrors of the life he and his wife live and the system he witnesses - barbaric cruelty and gruesome violence, much of it meted out by the murderous slave hunter Cobb (Jackie Earle Haley )– drives him to preach revolution and dream of freedom won by vengeful, righteous violence. You’ve got PURPOSE!” And as he turns his Bible education to sermons, he makes himself even more useful to the master. Nat has been told, almost since birth, that he’s “a child of God. But even though Samuel Turner (Hammer) grew up with young Nat and tolerates his familiarity, and efforts to get better treatment for all the farm’s slaves than local tradition expects, and even helps Nat rescue a tortured young slave ( Aja Naomi King) whom he eventually will marry, at the end of the day, “Massa” is still the white man who must be feared and obeyed. The film’s genius is in showing Turner’s acceptance of the “slavery’s in the BIBLE” argument of the whites until the murderous, inhuman cruelty of the system and the injustice of it all has him finding his own Bible passages to condemn the slave holders and justify revolt among the slaves themselves.Īrmie Hammer (“The Lone Ranger,” “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.”) is the son of the plantation family that owned Turner, people who fell on the more humane end of the “peculiar institution” spectrum as it was practiced in the 19th century South. Parker (“The Great Debaters”) plays Turner, a Tidewater Virginia slave taught to read by a patronizing but semi-sympathetic landowner (Penelope Ann Miller). Most recently he played the role of "Isaiah" in the 2016 film The Birth of a Nation, a film about the life of Nat Turner.If there’s a single good thing that has come out of the real-life rape controversy that has come to hang over Nate Parker’s “The Birth of a Nation,” it is that is forces one and all to dispense with the Sundance hype attached to this bio-drama and regard it on its own terms.Īnd it’s not bad, a solid “Hollywood” history of the 1830s Nat Turner slave revolt in Virginia with a love story, religion, injustices, torture and murder, a movie with middling, un-affecting acting but high artistic pretensions. Smith was in the 2007 film American Gangster with Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe, in which he played the role of "Nate", Frank Lucas's army connection in Vietnam. In 2006, he played the main villain in the straight-to-video actioner Mercenary for Justice, opposite Steven Seagal. In 2000, he portrayed Agent Screck in the first installment of the Final Destination horror films. He also played a villain in All About the Benjamins (2002) with Ice Cube. Smith starred with Laurence Fishburne and Jeff Goldblum in the 1992 film Deep Cover. He portrayed a corrupt detective in the martial arts/crime film Fist of the Warrior, alongside Ho-Sung Pak and Sherilyn Fenn. Smith was also the voice of Bao-Dur in the video game Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II The Sith Lords. Also in 2003, Smith read in the HBO documentary, Unchained Memories: Readings from the Slave Narratives the film, based on interviews conducted by the WPA in the 1930s with formerly enslaved African Americans, is a compilation of slave narratives with actors emulating the original conversation with the interviewer. In 2003, he had a starring role in the Steven Soderbergh/George Clooney TV series K-Street on HBO. In addition to his performances in major studio productions, Smith continues to work in and support independent film projects.
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