Spielberg has mounted a courtroom drama to rival the finest Grisham, with a coruscating civil rights debate resonating both within the film and into the present as the audience knows it.

The movie has tremendous scope and charge and a dense period fabric, along with a volcanic performance by Djimon Hounsou, the West African actor who plays Cinque.

Thematically rich, impeccably crafted, and intellectually stimulating, the only area where this movie falls a little short is in its emotional impact.

Sheer power, moral and otherwise. It possesses a massively majestic hero. [10 Dec 1997, p.D1]

Becomes a too-stately courtroom drama, with the Africans in the dock, the issue of slavery on trial at didactic length, and the top-billed Morgan Freeman as an abolitionist shunted to the sidelines with too little to do. [26 Jun 1998, p. 130]

Hounsou, a West African model with beauty and presence but no acting experience, carries much of the movie on his broad shoulders with surprising skill and strength.

What is most valuable about Amistad is the way it provides faces and names for its African characters, whom the movies so often make into faceless victims.

Aiming to instruct as well as entertain --- and often struggling to reconcile these two divergent goals.

Alive to the--yes--sometimes humorous, and therefore humanizing, struggles of the slaves and their would-be rescuers to surmount the language and cultural barriers that separate them. [15 Dec 1997, p. 108]

Hopkins uncannily projects Adams's suppressed agonies as well as his querulousness, his zest for scholarship as well as his zest for political intrigue, his pragmatism as well as his idealism. [22 Dec 1997, p. 25]

Dwarfed by the enormity of what it means to illustrate, the diffuse Amistad divides its energies among many concerns: the pain and strangeness of the captives' experience, the Presidential election in which they become a factor, the stirrings of civil war, and the great many bewhiskered abolitionists and legal representatives who argue about their fate.

Cinque, the rebel leader, is played by former model Hounsou, a mountainous figure who speaks in a gutteral roar and seems to embody the rage and confusion of an entire exploited continent.

Scenes go on and on in endless, witless dialogue, ever accompanied by John Williams' hideously gushing music.

Despite the Spielberg trademarks, a lavish attention to period detail and the occasional flash of visual potency, this is a picture you never get caught up in.