Young Washington

Nice try. That's the kindest thing I can say about this one, and I mean it, because you can actually see what they were reaching for. They just never got their hands on it.

This was pitched, at least in my head, as an inspirational movie about our greatest general. What I got was a slow, slow build to something that never really pays off. There's a version of this movie that works. This isn't it.

There's a version of this movie that works. This isn't it.

Let me give credit where it's due. The battle scenes are legitimately good. The choice to show Washington as more than the marble-statue American icon, as a young guy figuring it out, was the right call on paper. And the scenery is genuinely beautiful. If you told me someone was going to freeze-frame this thing for a landscape calendar, I'd believe you.

Now the problem. William plays Washington with basically no emotion. Flat. And Mia's right there with him, same narrow range, (but gorgeous blue eyes), same muted read on every scene. When two leads are giving you the same blank stare, that's not a coincidence, that's the guy in the director's chair. I don't know what he was going for, but "quiet stoicism" and "nothing happening behind the eyes" are not the same thing, and this movie confuses them for two hours.

I'll be honest, I thought about leaving. Briefly. Kids were with me, we stuck it out, and I don't regret staying, but I don't exactly feel rewarded either. By the time the credits rolled I was ready to be somewhere else, and by the time I got to the car I'd mostly stopped thinking about it. Nothing stuck. Not a scene, not a line, not a moment.

Would I watch it again? Maybe. Emphasis on maybe, and only because those battle sequences and that scenery are doing real work. If you're the exact right kind of history-curious person, there's something here for you. Everyone else is going to check the runtime twice.

They took a swing at making Washington human. I respect the swing. I just wish somebody on set had told the cast it was okay to actually feel something.