Film

The Suck-Amo

Forget It

by Bradley Steinbacher

dir. John Lee Hancock

Opens Fri April 9.

John Lee Hancock's The Alamo opens after the fact, moodily fading in and out of darkness, offering glimpses of the post-conflict carnage. We see a lifeless hand lying next to a broken pair of bifocals. We see lines, presumably numbers signifying villains killed, that have been etched into stone. We see piles of tattered clothing buried beneath rubble.

As an entry into the story, this is an interesting choice, for in opening the film this way it's apparent that Hancock and his co-writers, Leslie Bohem and Stephen Gaghan, are aware of the fact that the audience expects little more than violence from their film--the excitement of a historically accurate bloodbath; an American history snuff film. After all, everyone knows, or at least partially remembers, how the tale of the Alamo ends (for those who don't: Pretty much everybody dies), and without surprise, the filmmakers have little to offer but a sprinkling of backstory before letting the bullets fly.

Unfortunately, though there is much snuffing, there is also very little blood, and the end result is a film that, like Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, turns violence into little more than a cartoon. Tarantino's cartoonishness, though, was wholly intentional; The Alamo's lack of gore undermines the picture, stealing its necessary realism and turning the slaughter of close to 200 Texans by General Antonio López de Santa Anna's men into an empty charade--the equivalent of young boys pointing fingers at one another and shouting, "Bang! Bang!"

The story's major characters, you may recall, are Davy Crockett, Sam Houston, and Jim Bowie--three near-mythic men whose reputations, both before and after the fall of the Alamo, were massively inflated. The life of Davy Crockett (Billy Bob Thornton)--or the fictionalized account of his life--was already a popular plot for the theater at the time of the battle; Houston (Dennis Quaid) was thought of as the "George Washington of the Texas Revolution"; Bowie (Jason Patric) was a tough, wicked man who, rumors had it, had been shot and/or stabbed a startling number of times. These three men were the bravest of the brave, or so most everyone believed, and their involvement with the Alamo helped lift what was really little more than a valiant--if doomed from the outset--fight into the realm of American-defining legend. In fact, Sam Houston wasn't even present--he later orchestrated the avenging assault, bellowing that now famous revenge-soaked phrase "Remember the Alamo!" And now, with the help of Touchstone Pictures (a sibling of Disney--hence, surely, the lack of blood), we can.

There is nothing wrong with films that, like The Alamo, attempt to swell our hearts with patriotism; Saving Private Ryan, despite its many faults, managed to do just that. But while Steven Spielberg's picture took the courage of humble Americans and spun it into a thrilling bit of violent filmmaking, all John Lee Hancock can muster here is a B-grade picture that, though it attempts to be grand and heartfelt, is little more than a stock (and would-be) epic. This undoubtedly has much to do with the fact that Hancock has very little talent behind the lens. The Alamo has been assembled into a startlingly swift affair, ineptly cut and diced to blandness, which, coupled with Hancock's lack of flair with the camera, offers very little of interest. Long stretches of the film are pondering and dull--not much more than dusty men sitting around grumbling--which would be fine if the event all the grumbling led up to was going to wow and amaze us. This is something even Michael Bay, a true hack through and through, realized when he made his indefensible Pearl Harbor, a film that, though long and ponderous and thick-headed, still offered up a thrilling and exceedingly well-executed attack on Hawaii. In other words, Bay's film made good on the money shot--or shots--and for those 30 minutes of swarming Japanese Zeros and sinking battleships, much of the stupidity that preceded the attack was forgotten and, therefore, at least for a while, forgiven. The Alamo, on the other hand, has no such sequence--murky and poorly directed, there is no skill in the Alamo's fall, just smoke, tumbling stuntmen, and loud pops. It is, in other words, completely amateurish.

This jackleg quality also extends to the film's main performances. Dennis Quaid, whose career is currently in the midst of an applause-worthy rebound, sadly underperforms here, choking out gravel with every line. Jason Patric, who was once noteworthy (at least for an instant), plays Jim Bowie with all the glory of a sheet of plywood (he would have been smart to take a cue from his costar Quaid's performance as Doc Holliday--a man who, much like Bowie, was sickly yet heroic--in Lawrence Kasdan's disastrous Wyatt Earp; it remains a near-perfect piece of character acting). Only Billy Bob Thornton's Davy Crockett approaches being acceptable here, and even then just barely; calm and twangy and, as always, impeccable, Thornton throws all he can into the role, but Hancock's stiff direction undermines him at nearly every turn.

Which is too bad, because, like Davy Crockett himself, Thornton deserves far, far better. And so does the Alamo.

brad@thestranger.com