The Alamo
Rating: Two stars
Starring: Dennis Quaid, Billy Bob Thornton, Jason Patric, Patrick Wilson. Screenplay by Leslie Bohem and Stephen Gaghan and John Lee Hancock. Directed by Hancock. Rated PG-13 for sustained, intense battle sequences.

By AUSTIN O’CONNOR
Sun Staff
“Remember the Alamo!” goes the famous battle cry, but Disney’s new big-budget extravaganza slips from the mind so quickly it might as well be about the rental car agency, and not the famous Texas battle.
“Remember those sawdust-dry historical films they show at museums?!” That’s the more appropriate, if mealy-mouthed, rally cry here, only with familiar actors filling out those iconic, historical roles.
Among the recognizable faces are Billy Bob Thornton, who throws on a ridiculous bobbish mullet to play David (don’t call him “Davy”) Crockett, and Dennis Quaid, who throws on a pretty ridiculous guttural drawl and a sublimely ridiculous Bill the Butcher-esque stovepipe hat to play General Sam Houston, who participates chiefly in this telling of the Alamo by entirely ignoring the events that take place there until they are over.
That’s not to say that director and Texas native John Lee Hancock’s version of the events is entirely ridiculous. It is a sturdy enough enterprise, albeit a boring one, and it often looks great — in fact, it often looks too great.
A grittier telling would probably have felt far more authentic. As it is, the Disney movie at times has the artifice of a Disney theme park attraction. When the Mexican troops finally overwhelm the converted mission, for instance, Hancock pulls back for a breathtaking shot from above, as Santa Anna’s soldiers rush toward the Alamo walls like millions of ants toward a picnic.
But it’s breathtaking to a fault: The adobe walls of the Alamo are perfectly illuminated. Those soldiers might as well be taking over Epcot Center.
The movie has a spotty history. Director Ron Howard was first attached, but moved to the executive producer spot early, reportedly worried about the bland script. And the film’s release date was unceremoniously moved away from the late-year Oscar bait period to the springtime dumping ground.
Its troubled road seems appropriate for the angle it takes on the events and character that populate its story. In the movie, Texas is a land of second chances: Crockett is a failed congressman from Tennessee whose legend is far bigger than he is; fellow Tennessean Houston was ousted as the state’s governor after a scandal and begins the movie with a terrible drinking habit and tenuous control of his Texas Army; Col. Jim Bowie (Jason Patric) is battling consumption and undermining the leadership of Lt. Col. William Travis (Patrick Wilson), an Alabama native and fresh divorcé for whom protecting the Alamo represents a chance to climb the leadership ranks and take his piece of Texas.
Crockett, Bowie and Travis are among the 180 men who take root in the Alamo after ruthless Mexican General Santa Anna (Emilio Echevarria), angry that his converted-mission-turned-military-fort has fallen to the Texas rebels, marches thousands of troops to its cusp, then sets up camp, and waits to mess with Texas.
Travis sends couriers back to Houston with pleas for reinforcements, but the general considers the Alamo a lost cause. The men inside the fort don’t, though, and they bide their time — knife-fighter Bowie coughs up a lot of blood and eventually makes nice with Travis, while Crockett pulls out his fiddle and plays a few tunes for the boys — until they surmise that they’re on their own.
Considering that Hancock and Quaid are Texans to the core, it’s is a surprisingly detached telling of the story. Only those soaked in the state’s folklore will feel like they have anything at all invested in the goings-on, which culminate in the famed Battle of San Jacinto, where Houston and his troops took bloody revenge on Santa Anna and his troops, vanquishing them in less than 20 minutes and gaining Texas independence.
Hancock and fellow screenwriters Leslie Bohem and Stephen Gaghan are intent on turning the battle into a character study of the men involved, and so the story is mostly focused on what happens within the walls of the Alamo while it is surrounded by the Mexicans. Problem is, that also means it is mostly focused on a few sketchily drawn characters who sit around and wait to die.
Those deaths were certainly noble and so, I guess, is the effort here. But it’s as dry as it is misguided, and when Davy Crockett whips his bow across those strings again at movie’s end, the King of the Wild Frontier provides an epilogue worthy of Nero, fiddling while The Alamo crumbles all around him.
Austin O’Connor’s e-mail address is aoconnor@lowellsun.com.