Cinque is seen in extreme, sweaty, bloody close-up trying to pry a rusty nail from a rotted wooden floor. He is one of several African slaves who have been violently abused and treated like animals on board a Spanish sailing ship called La Amistad. The nail sets Cinque free from those piercing iron shackles and a revolt takes place against the Spanish crew. Judging from this justifiable insurrection, you'd think that "Amistad" is Cinque's story but it is not, only in a secondary maybe tertiary way.
The insurrection leads Cinque (Djimon Hounsou) to be hoodwinked into thinking he'll return to Africa - he is redirected to New York with the others. They are to be tried for murder yet nobody in the courtroom can decide who these slaves really belong to and it becomes rather comical when the Spaniards lay claim as well as Navy officers. Ultimately, this whole shebang is proof that they see these slaves as nothing more than commodities, property, cargo, but not human beings. So when a real-estate lawyer gets involved, Roger Baldwin (Matthew McConaughey, who looks like some 1960's hippie professor who smoked one too many blunts), he provides a perceived slam dunk case since the slaves were clearly kidnapped from Africa, not Cuba, and the revolt happened outside the U.S. A couple of abolitionists, Lewis Tappan (Stellan Skarsgard) and his associate Theodore Joadson (Morgan Freeman, standing out more as a symbol than a character), a fictional former slave, find documents and inventory sheets that can prove their case. However, under the cold hands of President Martin Van Buren (Nigel Hawthorne), a new young judge takes over and he decides they should be free. Not so fast when the legal machinations face an appeal and the case has to be retried. Who better to make things right than the sleepy John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins) who can stand before Supreme Court justices and deliver a preachy sermon where he names drops past U.S. Presidents and the Constitution. It is beautifully summarized in that context but it does little to provide justice for these slaves.
"Amistad" has a staggeringly powerful flashback sequence, "the Middle Passage," where we see how these slaves were treated on board that ship, from being thrown overboard in a chain link to some whipped to death and starved, etc. One woman with a child throws herself overboard. This is Cinque's subjective and troubling view of being a simple man driven to rage and murder by ruthless, money-grubbing captors. "Amistad," unfortunately, loses its primary focus on Cinque to the lawyers who are trying to prove they were captured and not born slaves. It leads to one stirring moment - the movie's best scene - where Cinque is in court and repeatedly says, "GIVE US FREE!" The courtroom is awed by this earth-shattering pronouncement and it should've been sufficient cause for seeing Cinque as a wronged man but we do not get enough of Cinque's own individualism. He is an angry slave yet he's also a man who had a family in Africa and was taken away. Seeing it more from his perspective rather than involving the two lawyers and a handy translator makes "Amistad" more of a potent courtroom drama articulating a virtuous issue than a story of a man driven to and from hell. It is a watchable picture but it could have been so much more. Spielberg should've just let Cinque be free to tell his story.
