It is sumptuously mounted, there's a battle sequence that's as good as I've seen in an historical epic and the period is summoned up pretty well. Yet The Alamo, though better than John Wayne's gung-ho 1960 effort, refuses to take flight. It's heartfelt but uninvolving.
Cursed with being accounted one of Disney's most miserable flops in America, The Alamo seems unlikely to do much better here, since most of us only have the vaguest idea of what happened when Davy Crockett and his band occupied the Alamo Fort and were decimated by superior Mexican forces. Director John Lee Hancock never explains. He merely provides a gently recidivist version of the story in which Crockett is not so much a hero as an eccentric opportunist and Jim Bowie a tubercular grump with a massively outsized ego.
Billy Bob Thornton's portrait of Davy, consistently watchable, is the best performance; Jason Patric, as Bowie, and Dennis Quaid, as drunken General Sam Houston, scarcely register.
The Alamo is too long and too sluggishly paced, and the fact that the battle comes two-thirds of the way through, followed by Houston's successful but rather tedious revenge attack, doesn't improve matters.
Even so, it looks good and it tries, ever so hard, to put a slant on history that is beyond mere flag-waving. That's something.
The Alamo
Cert: cert12A
