QUEEN OF KATWE (Mira Nair). 124 minutes. Opens Friday (September 23). See listing. Rating: NN
There are movies that please crowds, and there are movies determined to be crowd-pleasers. Queen Of Katwe is the latter, a brightly coloured and insistently upbeat true story that never stops reminding you how inspirational it is.
This biopic of Ugandan chess prodigy Phiona Mutesi (played by newcomer Madina Nalwanga), who emerged from the slums of Kampala to compete in the 39th Chess Olympiad in Moscow in 2011, features solid performances by David Oyelowo as Phiona’s teacher and Lupita Nyong’o as her mother. The film has an excellent sense of place, immersing us in Phiona’s world and showing us exactly how hard she has to work to break out of it.
But either director Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding, The Namesake, Amelia) or distributor Disney or both didn’t trust that material to play, so Phiona’s story has been inspirationalized within an inch of its life – its conflicts oversimplified, its musical score relentless, its uplift exhausting. They’ve turned a great true story into an easily digestible, utterly predictable formula picture.
