Revolution

Synopsis: New York trapper Tom Dobb (Al Pacino) becomes an unwilling participant in the American Revolution after his son Ned (Sid Owen/Dexter Fletcher) is drafted into the rebel army.

Failing to convince as either history or romance, Revolution, Hugh Hudson’s big budget historical romance is such a dud that one can only wonder how so much effort could have been made to such little effect. (There is a 2009 director’s cut DVD release that might help in this respect).

What everyone will immediately fix upon is the misguided marquee casting. With an unidentifiable accent that might be Scots via modern day New Jersey and a wig that looks like it was based on Mel Gibson’s Lethal Weapon mullet, Pacino is woefully inappropriate as an 18th century yokel and his attempts at acting are look-away embarrassing. Nastassja Kinski, a hot star in the 1980s albeit of very limited range, is even less fitting as a head-strong young New York high society rebel, Daisy McConnahay who throws her lot in with the Revolution and so becomes Dobb’s romantic interest. As she had already memorably demonstrated her acting limitations in Roman Polanski's Hardy adaptation Tess (1979) why she was cast in another singularly ill-fitting part is no small puzzle. The other big name, Donald Sutherland, who plays a sadistic British army sergeant, has virtually no dialogue and largely spends the whole time lowering villainously whilst Joan Plowright provides a brief respite from the lack-lustre performances as Daisy’s mother.  

Truth be told, however, probably no actor could save the film from Robert Dillon’s tedious and contrived script which has the characters paths criss-crossing conveniently in defiance of the turmoil of events and the number of years which elapse. Top this off with Hudson’s shapeless direction which despite the considerable budget not only fails to evoke a sense of time and place (it was filmed largely in the U.K. with some scenes shot in Norway) but also makes an at-best token effort to relate its half-hearted narrative to the historical events instead giving us generic “popular uprising” scenes that, bar the ungainly hand-held camera-work would not be out of place in a film such as A Tale Of Two Cities (1956). So pointless and borderline incomprehensible is all this that one wonders whether Hudson, a director who had a huge Oscar-winning hit with Chariots of Fire in 1981, then seemingly lost the plot with Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord Of The Apes in 1984, did not at some stage go home leaving the film to his AD, to complete.

FYI:  The film was the most expensive box-office disaster in British film history and has been credited as being single-handedly responsible for a decade-long financial crisis in the industry after the massive losses scared off city financing for British films. Pacino did not make another film until 1989’s Sea Of Love,

 

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