Mild, Mild, West

Remember The Alamo?  Uh, no thanks...

by Michael Sean McGowan

    The Alamo feels like a very poorly put together puzzle.  It has pieces scrunched together at odd angles and other parts jammed where they shouldn't be in the first place.  Basically, some of the components of compelling historical semi-fiction are here, but director John Lee Hancock (The Rookie) doesn't seem to be better able to muster his assets into a coherent force than the nearly 200 Texas militia and regulars who tried to defend a bombed-out Spanish mission in 1836.

    It's a shame, because the real-life story of the Alamo seems to be the stuff of compelling fiction.  An event that could wrap so many popular names of early-American history such as Jim Bowie and Davey Crockett into one place could play like Tex-Mex bubble-gum, a kind of down-South version of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.  This updated version of The Alamo, though (standing in the shadow of the 1960 John Wayne version), is too off to hit any appreciable end of the spectrum; it is too fabricated to make compelling drama, it is too dry to be cheesy fun.

    The Alamo is essentially a hand-me-down film.  The idea was originally helmed by Ron Howard (who directed last year's snoozer The Missing) with a script by Texas-aficionado John Sayles.  Howard backed out when his hopes of an R-rated project were rejected and Sayles' screenplay was dumped in favor of one by Leslie Bohem (Daylight, Dante's Peak).  Along with this, A-list actors Russell Crowe and Ethan Hawke walked away to be replaced by a blanched-out Jason Patrick and Dennis Quaid, who walks through the whole film looking like someone's stuffed a lemon in his mouth.

    Given that this is a movie about war, enormous set-pieces involving roaring muskets and white-tailed rockets lighting up the night sky seem to be a well-duh proposition, and The Alamo certainly has its share.  But while I wouldn't say that anything in The Alamo looks particularly fake, none of it is used to the effect a more seasoned filmmaker could.  Take one scene: the Mexican army under the command of dictator General Santa Anna have placed the mission under siege and are tormenting the defenders with persistent cannonball bombardments.  Here, Hancock tries to slip in a money shot.  We witness one launch from the cannonball's POV as it roars from the cannon, through an arc, and down over the mission wall.  It's a great shot and technically well done, but what was the point?  Nothing of any consequence immediately follows.  A moment like this would have been better saved for a scene of maximum tension, perhaps during the final assault on the Alamo.  The rest of the movie is like this; Hancock doesn't seem to have a clue how drum up any strong emotions; sympathy, horror, excitement.

    A great deal of the acting is equally dull.  Norfolk's Travis Wilson plays William Travis, the ineffectual commander of the Texas regulars at the Alamo, with no life or surprise.  Quaid, who is normally so good, seems content with acting like his own stunt double here.  The only stand-out is Billy Bob Thornton, whose Davey Crockett is given a nice, man-behind-the-legend glance.  He's shown as a cautious participant in the events around him, always under watchful eye of admirers who know his tall-tale exploits better than he does.  In one of the few sublime moments of the movie, he gets up on the Alamo wall and adds his fiddle the Mexican war march playing down below.

    There is also a question of intentions.  No doubt that marketers of The Alamo intended to ride whatever remaining scraps of American pride might be left from the debacle in Iraq, however, while it praises the defenders' heroism, it seems to find their common sense lacking.  In the first ten minutes of the movie General Sam Houston (Quaid) derides the Alamo as a useless piece of property whose defense is militarily negligible.   This may be more historically accurate, but it is a dramatic botch- after all, how can we appreciate or even applaud a sacrifice made in vain?

    I did like a few things about The Alamo.  Thornton's performance is superb, probably one of his best.  I also like the way the script, as dramatically inert as it is, also has a minimum expectation from the audience; it assumes that we know that in 1836, Texas was struggling to be a separate republic rather than another state of the Union.  There are also a few scenes involving a pair of slaves within the Alamo walls that are treated with some degree of realism rather than being doused with modern-PC sentimentality. 

    It's a tragedy, though, that The Alamo ends up as so much anti-drama: it takes the compelling and makes it the mundane.  They say everything is bigger in Texas, and The Alamo proves this right: including the s*** it can bore out of you.  C