‘Alamo’ takes a few shots

Frisky Texans must be lining up to see — better say inspect —”The Alamo.” Has Hollywood messed with their baby? Yes. Director John Lee Hancock’s “Alamo” is a revisionist Alamo. It is a splash of fashionable cold water on jingoistic John Wayne’s 1960 epic.

The good news, though — for Texans and for the rest of us who are bored with reflexive kill-whitey attitudes in academia and Hollywood — is that Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, Sam Houston and Co. are still heroes.

Clay-footed and flawed, but still heroes.

Billy Bob Thornton’s Crockett is full of self-doubt and regret and political ambition. Jason Patric’s Bowie is a mercurial drunk. Dennis Quaid’s Houston is a vain drunk. Patrick Wilson’s William Travis is a womanizing, gambling dandy.

Fate gathers the unlikely gaggle at the Alamo. Crockett, the Tennessean congressman and bear-hunting legend, thinks he’s waltzing into the presidency of Texas. Travis, young and inexperienced, is temporarily in command and not particularly thrilled about it. Yet they all fight valiantly, as history records them.

And Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna (Emilio Echevarria), though he’s given a dubiously prophetic line about how Mexico will be begging for American crumbs if the “Texians” succeed, receives no airbrushing. He’s a decadent, Napoleonic militarist with little regard for the lives of his men.

Mr. Hancock searches for a more palatable (to modern tastes), but no less mythological meaning for the Alamo. He envisions it as a kind of pre-gold rush version of California, a frontier for fresh starts and second chances.

The 13-day Alamo siege saw a ragtag band of fewer than 200 Texan militiamen and regulars, encircled in a converted Franciscan mission in San Antonio, fight off a superior force of more than 2,000 Mexican troops before finally being overcome.

Those, at least, are the facts. The encrusted mythology of the Alamo is that 1836 was Texas’ very own 1776, its birth-of-a-nation tale. The Alamo was, in truth, the rallying point of a more important confrontation: the battle of San Jacinto, in which Houston finally defeated Mexican strongman Santa Anna.

Mr. Hancock and co-writers Leslie Bohem and Stephen Gaghan have trouble balancing these two hinges of Texan republican independence.

Here, San Jacinto is hastily tacked onto a movie that for two hours builds to a natural climax — the final attack on the mission-fortress.

A simple epilogue would’ve sufficed, especially considering the battle lasted a scant 18 minutes. But Mr. Hancock couldn’t resist the completism.

“The Alamo” was originally slated to join last year’s season-closing armada of war-themed movies, among them “Master and Commander,” “The Last Samurai,” “Cold Mountain” and the final “Lord of the Rings.”

An overabundant rough cut was obviously the reason for the delay. The ambitious Mr. Hancock, to his credit, spends ample time characterizing his legendary leads — rare for a war picture with panoramic battle sequences.

We’re introduced to Travis coldly divorcing his wife and abandoning his son. We meet Houston and Crockett at a Washington party of politicos, two has-beens who wasted their potential.

Mr. Thornton, an Arkansan on easy terms with Crockett’s coonskin celebrity, has one of the film’s best scenes. A few Alamo grunts look to their hero for a tale of backwoods derring-do. Instead Crockett recounts, ruefully, a massacre of Indians.

This kind of thing is done delicately. Crockett isn’t Jeffersonized into monstrous hypocrisy. He’s humanized within the context of rough-and-tumble early America.

Mr. Hancock doesn’t fare as well with the character of Juan Seguin (Jordi Molla), the Tejano who would later become mayor of San Antonio. One is hard-pressed here to figure why Seguin fights on the side of the Anglos.

A subplot involving two black slaves is little more than a perfunctory, half-hearted distraction.

Also, I didn’t like the flashback device Mr. Hancock used to conjure the romance of Bowie’s mixed marriage. Lying on his deathbed with a hacking cough — Tuberculosis? Pneumonia? No one’s sure — Bowie spends intimate time under the care of pretty Tejano maidens.

Think Mr. Hancock and producer Ron Howard, noticing the male domination of “Master and Commander,” sought to populate “The Alamo” with at least a modicum of attractive women? I’m guessing in the affirmative.

There’s no escaping it, though; “The Alamo,” with its screaming cannon fire and hail of musket balls, is a war buff’s movie. Even more, it is a movie for Texans, if they can stand the historical fine-tuning.

**1/2

TITLE: “The Alamo”

RATING: PG-13 (Intense battle sequences)

CREDITS: Directed by John Lee Hancock. Produced by Mark Johnson and Ron Howard. Written by Leslie Bohem, Stephen Gaghan and Mr. Hancock. Cinematography by Philip Steuer. Music by Carter Burwell.

RUNNING TIME: 135 minutes.

WEB SITE: https://www.thealamofilm.com

MAXIMUM RATING: FOUR STARS