Unlike his Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg‘s Amistad (1997) has no bona fide sense of the tragic, but is simply a work of uncomplicated pro-freedom moralism. Here, pro-freedom means anti-slavery—something everyone embraces anyway. The flick features a court trial where it must be determined whether mutinous slaves were illegally transported on the ship Amistad. It glorifies the agitated African leader, Cinque (Djimou Hounsou), who comes to have an emotional connection with the film’s noble whites. Cue the sentimental idealism.

But, oh, these whites! One of them, John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins), avers in the courtroom, “The natural state of mankind is freedom!” Freedom from what? The man speaks nonsense. And Matthew McConaughey‘s Roger Baldwin, a defense lawyer, is so superficially created he is a sheer nonentity of a character. Then again, the other figures are superficially created as well. David Frazoni’s screenplay is virtue-signaling non-art. Amistad was a mistake right off the bat—the kind of mistake to which Spielberg is regularly blind.

(All reviews are written by Earl Dean)