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‘The Ballad of Davy Crockett’ Review: Passable Historical Drama Imagines an Early Adventure of the Legendary Frontiersman
In ‘The Ballad of Davy Crockett,’ Colm Meany steals the show with his villainous turn as the corrupt leader of a fur trading outfit.
For audiences of a certain age, it might be amusing, or maybe even disappointing, when, early in “ The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” the eponymous hero skins a raccoon to fashion a bandage for a serious leg wound, rather than to make a hat of the sort famously worn by Fess Parker when he played the character in enduringly popular Disney miniseries and movie spin-offs. William Moseley(“The Chronicles of Narnia”) is effectively earnest as the legendary frontiersman in Purvis’ leisurely paced but sporadically exciting historical drama, which focuses on the period when Crockett, then a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for Tennessee, became an outspoken critic of the 1830 Indian Removal Act pushed by President Andrew Jackson (played, fleetingly, by Edward Finlay with enough makeup to make him resemble a waxworks figure). If impatient viewers prefer to hit the fast-forward button while watching on nontheatrical platforms, well, they can still appreciate DP James King’s handsome lensing of the locales in and around Kingston Springs, Tenn., and Stephen Keech’s appropriately old-school musical score.
Or read this on Variety