Our Rating: 3.00
Hey, any picture that draws the ire of Oliver North can’t be all bad, right? Disney’s already-tanking epic is actually a fair contribution to that curious subset of the historical genre, the Waiting Around to Die Movie. (“Titanic,” of course, is the gold standard). Given the inherent inertia of its citadel-under-siege setup, the movie does a decent job of retaining dramatic forward motion — even as it’s uneasily reconciling the modern passion for humanizing our historical figures with the mass-market necessity of enshrining them as larger-than-life heroes anyway. Goons like North are nonetheless steamed by the “revisionism” the film practices, as when it suggests that Davy Crockett (Billy Bob Thornton) didn’t die valorously in the heat of battle, but rather as a valorously defiant political prisoner shortly thereafter. Shocking liberties, I know. The unmitigated low point: Jason Patric’s Jim Bowie, sloooowly wasting away from what doctors used to call “consumption” but we now know as “overacting.”
This article appears in Apr 14-20, 2004.