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Will Smith as Peter and Ben Foster as his sadistic hunter in the loosely fact-based Emancipation.

In this light,there’s something to be said for the pulpy tall-tale approach taken by Quentin Tarantino inDjango Unchained,which puts imagination and blunt-force impact ahead of realism and conventional good taste.

Antoine Fuqua has a bet each way inEmancipation,a loosely fact-based Will Smith vehicle that aims to combine prestige drama with a survival thriller in the mould ofThe Revenant. Smith’s character,named Peter in the film,is introduced as a slave toiling on a railroad in Louisiana midway through the Civil War,when word filters through that thanks to Lincoln,he and his comrades are technically free.

To make use of that freedom in practice,they have to escape their overseers and make their way across the swamps to Baton Rouge,where the Union army is stationed. The resulting pursuit takes up roughly two-thirds of the movie,with the dour,fatalistic Peter gradually morphing into an action hero – the other escapees,barely characterised,soon drop out of sight – and Ben Foster as the chief sadist on his trail.

In some ways this is unfamiliar terrain for Fuqua,a habitual crowd-pleaser whose recent hits include Denzel Washington’s breezily violentEqualizerfilms. But he remains the same flashy,unsubtle stylist he’s always been,shooting in high-contrast black-and-white with kitschy glimmers of colour,and having his camera pirouette above his characters’ heads as if exulting in the freedom they lack.

Often he and screenwriter William N. Collage seem caught between noble intentions and their baser entertainment instincts,as in the soon-to-be-notorious scene where Peter wrestles an alligator,evidently a bid to topThe Revenant pitting Leonardo DiCaprio against a digital grizzly bear.

As with DiCaprio’s Oscar-winningRevenantperformance,the demands made on Smith are more about physical commitment than psychological complexity. Still,he takes the project entirely seriously,expunging any remaining trace of the buoyancy that first made him a star.

For quite a while I was tempted to write offEmancipationas simply a bad movie,which in some ways it is. But for all its silliness it builds in weight and power,especially when Fuqua – who ranks among the most commercially successful African-American filmmakers of all time – pointedly refers back to iconic images some viewers may have had in mind all along.

There is more than one allusion toGone With The Wind,that most dubious of popular classics. And there’s another scene,perhaps the most ambiguous in the film,where John learns of the existence of a recent invention known as photography.

One way or another,these are reminders that the story told inEmancipation underpins the entire history of US cinema,although it can seem as if the work of trying to tell it adequately has hardly begun.

Emancipation is streaming on Apple TV+ from December 9.

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