If by chance you are in too great a hurry to read three movie reviews this afternoon, just know that The Alamo is one of the dullest movies ever made. And that it has Dennis Quaid looking constipated. Which livens things up, comparatively.
John Lee Hancock misses The Alamo for the trees
By Aaron Mesh
Published in the April 14 issue of the Pulse
About halfway through The Alamo, the bedraggled soldiers defending the famous stone mission are beginning to consider surrender to the Mexican troops besieging them. But then they see an ominous red flag raised over General Santa Anna’s troops. Its message seems pretty unambiguous: a giant skull looming over the words “Muerte de Traidores.” But director John Lee Hancock, worried that the audience might not understand this message, adds a translation in giant white subtitles. At that moment, I myself surrendered, abandoning any hope that the movie might grow enjoyable: Hancock had taken the movie’s first moment that could provide a jolt of mythic power, and ruined it with ham-fisted explanation.
I have no idea whether The Alamo is historically faithful to the events of 1836, when Santa Ana’s troops slaughtered an outmanned group of Texas rebels. But it certainly wants to be accurate, down to the last carving on the mission’s walls. The movie reminded me of those Civil War reenactments where people obsess over every button on their replica uniforms, stand around in field pretending to shoot each other, and go home satisfied in their authenticity. Hancock seems completely tone deaf to the mood of the events, the doomed heroism that makes the Alamo legendary. But he wants to make darn sure you know what the flag says.
The attention to detail would be fine if it were put to a purpose. Any purpose would do. But this is not a movie, like Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, intent on uncovering the ugly realities of war. It takes its accuracy and puts it to the service of battle scenes as squeamishly bloodless as a 1940s western, without the wit or style of those old movies. It looks exactly like recent overwrought period pieces like Titanic or The Patriot, with the same slow-motion shots and exaggerated score. But those movies were using their historical settings as an excuse for romance and family drama. The Alamo is using these techniques for nothing at all. The characters sit around and wait, they nap, then they wait some more, and the music and pacing scream all the while that this is very important. Because we all know what a hot-button issue Texan independence is today.
I’m guessing that the point, such as one exists, is to deconstruct the Alamo legend to something realistic, but the film just builds another one, with all the portentousness and none of the grandeur. This blend of verisimilitude and melodrama is a deadly concoction, a movie that Davy Crockett himself might describe as plumb awful. Really, there are no words to explain how boring this movie is. It’s an artless mess, a seemingly endless string of scenes where the Alamo’s defenders observe that things look pretty grim, then make the same comment again. Sometimes they are interrupted by truly lousy special effects, including a woefully unconvincing cannonball-view shot that is patently ripped off from Pearl Harbor. Yes, you heard that right: here is a movie that’s actually trying to copy Michael Bay. And what’s truly frightening is that it fails to reach those heights.
It doesn’t help matters that the movie looks terrible: Every night shot is washed out to a fuzzy blue haze, like a black T-shirt that’s been through the rise cycle for a decade or so. The performers are nearly as colorless: Jason Patric takes a game shot at breathing life into James Bowie, but he is quickly resigned to croaking lines from a sickbed. Meanwhile Dennis Quaid, perhaps sensing that his vehicle is a disaster, delivers what will undoubtedly go down as the best bad acting of the year. His drunken commander Sam Houston steadily holds a hilariously bug-eyed facial expression, as if someone had just asked him to drink a saucer of rancid milk. In his best moment, he stands on a battlefield, closes his eyes and sniffs the air, his brow furrowed with something between ecstasy and the sudden relief from constipation. This is camp at its finest.
The only sincerely good performance is Billy Bob Thornton as Davy Crockett. Thornton’s Crockett is a bit of a charlatan, simultaneously trying to escape and live up to his own legend, but he’s a passionate fraud: when he picks up a fiddle, The Alamo is shot through with the life it otherwise lacks. And Thornton gets the movie’s only haunting scene, austerely recounting the story of an Indian massacre that ended with soldiers eating potatoes roasted on the flesh of their victims. The harrowing tale works because Thornton so clearly cares about its meaning, the awful poetry of its images. He realizes that a narrative’s power emerges from something deeper than the listing of facts. John Lee Hancock has no such understanding, and The Alamo is the tedious result of his tin ear.