The Alamo

Herald rating: * *

From this distance, the passion for the events at the Alamo may be hard to fathom: it wasn't a glorious defeat, it was a total cockup in an unnecessary war; historic figures, granted mythic status, were unlikeable and flawed; and it was one of the first occasions when the fledgling nation's foreign policy came down to "They've got it, we want it, we'll take it."

The story of Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, Sam Houston and their Mexican nemesis, Santa Ana, has been filmed before, of course; most famously in an inaccurate but typically flag-waving version starring John Wayne in 1960. For this latest revision, the plan was for Ron Howard to direct, for Russell Crowe and Ethan Hawke to star, for historical consultants to oversee every frame, for the Alamo to be rebuilt in Texas. The budget was US$100 million.

As with the real incident, things went wrong from the start. Howard pulled out and his boys followed, replaced by John Lee Hancock, an inexperienced director who had co-written the movie, Dennis Quaid and Patrick Wilson. If the film's success is measured at the box-office, for every dollar they put in, the directors turned it into 25c. Ouch.

The movie reduces 1830s frontier history to a simple fact: Mexico owned Texas; Americans and Texans wanted it.

The settlers declared a republic and drew a ragtag defence force, largely men promised land for enlisting. Other chancers happened along for selfish reasons: Bowie, Crockett and garrison commander William Travis needed to redeem their reputations after earlier mistakes.

Billy Bob Thornton (Crockett), Jason Patric (Bowie), Wilson (Travis) and Quaid (General Sam Houston, the President of Texas) are the key characters. Crockett has lost his Senate seat and come to Texas to claim land, not fight. Bowie is dying and is at the Alamo to take its cannon back to Houston. Travis is a wannabe politician who never expected to be a military commander. They, and 250 others, will become martyrs when Santa Ana, the strutting Mexican general, surrounds the fortified former mission town with 4000 men, and Houston declines to send reinforcements because he knows the game is lost. He will win the long game by routing the Mexicans a year later at the battle of San Jacinto.

Thornton draws Crockett as a rueful man who knows he's not the larger-than-life figure that contemporary newspapers and playwrights have made him. Bowie and Travis are rivals for command of the Alamo; Travis the patriot, Bowie the world-weary soldier who knows his time is almost up. Santa Ana (Emilio Echevarria) is a monster who will waste his men's lives without need or care in the brutal battle.

The "battle" of the Alamo was a defeat that has been reshaped as a byword for honour, passion and selflessness. In the film-makers' hands, however, it becomes a disconnected series of episodes, perhaps because Hancock shot over 100 hours of film and tried to edit it to two hours without losing anything. The success of this glorious failure is in Thornton's marvellous performance as the doomed Davy Crockett.

The DVD goes a long way to provide context in a commentary by the two historical consultants, Alan Huffines and Stephen L. Hardin, who talk freely about what really happened and what was just movie stuff. There's an adequate making-of feature, a few deleted scenes that wouldn't have added much, and Deep In The Heart of Texans, a passionate and overblown poem to the Lone Star State.