Ride With the Devil

In "Ride with the Devil," Jake Roedel is a callow youth residing in conditions of Southern gentility in Missouri just as the War Between the States starts to heat up. After marauding Union bandits brutally slay his best friend Jack Bull's father, Jake and said best friend join a rival band of marauding Confederate bandits, who ride around the surrounding country terrorizing Federal interests by day and drinking whiskey and playing poker around the fire by night. Eventually, of course, Jake begins to doubt the cause he fights for, with the help of an honorable slave who teaches Jake that maybe slavery isn't such a good idea after all. He marries the most fertile-looking woman he can find, and, having become a man, takes off for parts unknown.

How could you possibly screw a promising story like this up?

It's a complex process, so we'll take it step by step. First, you pick Ang Lee to direct the movie. Lee is undoubtedly a good director, but his past filmography includes movies like "The Ice Storm" and "Sense and Sensibility" which do not exactly augur well for his ability to direct a war movie. Lee does provide some truly harrowing war footage and deftly depicts the horrific pain when Jack Bull must undergo amputation without anesthetic. But Lee makes one fatal error: he packs way too many moments of tender reflection and deliberation into this movie. He packs in so many reflective moments, in fact, that the movie ends up being primarily composed of them, instead of grisly North-South battles and tense confrontations between Roedel and longhaired psychos. War movies tend to lose momentum when the war itself is not being fought, and when the war recedes too far into the background war movies wilt and die. And, indeed, one waits impatiently through much of this movie for something to actually happen. When Lee lets the men fight the war, it ends up being too little, too late.

Just for the sake of argument, though, let's hypothesize that this isn't meant to be a war movie so much as a tale of a boy becoming a man, with war on the side. If you wanted to undertake this dubious enterprise, your second step in screwing up this film would be casting Tobey Maguire as Jake Roedel. Tobey, whom some of you will remember as the geeky sitcom obsessor in "Pleasantville," has the boy part of boy-turns-into-man down pat. However, no flowing locks, no facility with a weapon, not even all the dirt in Missouri smeared on his face by some misguided makeup person can make him into a man. He looks like a boy with long hair and a gun and dirt on his face. When his benefactors in the film get him cleaned up, he looks even more like a boy. Where is the cold steel in his eyes from having "killed 15 men," as he boasts? Where is the maturity to avoid being swept up mindlessly in a cause he does not believe in? Tobey tries his best, but he cannot transform into a man, and at the end of the film he has to settle for a sort of advanced boyhood.

Continuing with our hypotheticals, let's say for some reason you absolutely had to hire Tobey. Then hiring Jewel to play the abovementioned fertile-looking woman and expecting her to say-ee-ave this film would be your third step down the road to ruin. Jewel's debut will no doubt entice a lot of people to attend this film who otherwise might not, but that doesn't mean they'll enjoy attending it. Jewel herself is not ludicrously bad, but neither is she very good. She's basically inert, in fact, even when she makes a big show of flouting societal convention by reverting to her maiden name after she becomes a widow or engaging in premarital relations with Jake's best friend.

Well, now you're sunk. You can hire all the engaging supporting actors you want, like Jeffrey Wright as the abovementioned honorable slave or Skeet Ulrich as Jack Bull. You can shove in some beautiful photography. You can even give the plot's exposition three annoying times (once in an opening scrolling paragraph, once in a conversation between two unidentified Southern gentlemen, and once out of Tobey's mouth). It won't matter a whit. This movie shows occasional brilliance and flits of promise, but it ends up being a meandering, blah rambling over events that, against all odds, end up seeming unimportant. And that's why, despite its surface promise, you shouldn't take this "Ride with the Devil."

I stuck this in "Dramas" because I was sure that was where Ang Lee would have wanted me to stick it. This makes two weak movies out of his last three (along with "The Hulk"). Even if "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" kicked beaucoup ass, one out of three ain't good. What's up, Ang?

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