The Four Feathers

Review - 9/20/02

The Four Feathers is about a man's quest to regain the trust and respect of his fellow soldier, friends, and family.  Heather Ledger plays the leading character, Harry, a skillful British soldier in the late 1800's.   He is in command of his own regiment, but when The British Government wants to send him and his squad to Sudan to stop the Mahdi Savages, he resigns from the army.  Everybody calls him a coward, so four people give him white feathers.  Three comes from soldiers in his regiment, while the fourth comes from his Fiancé Ethnie,  hence The Four Feathers.  A white feather signifies "cowardice."  So the rest of the movie is about him trying the prove something to himself and others. 

If you expect this movie to be like "The Patriot" with Mel Gibson, then you will be disappointed.  There is not much action in this movie.  At the beginning I almost fell asleep.  That might be due to the fact that I got to bed late the night before, but enough about that.  So it was slow for about the first hour or so.  There is another good actor in the movie who helps out our friend Harry.  He is becoming one of the coolest actors out there, in my opinion, but he is mostly unknown.  I do not know his name but he was the black dude in  "Gladiator."  He was also in "Amistad" and played Mobilayjay in the TV Series E.R.  He was pretty cool in this movie as was Heath Ledger for all he had to endure throughout the movie.  I still thought that it was weak.  The battle scenes sucked but what are you going to do for PG-13.  The fighting at the end was cool but, it happened way to late to get me into the movie.  It ran about 2 hours and 20 minutes, which is about 30 minutes too long.   I say more action, less drama dammit!  On a side note, all of the little teenage girls will flock to see this because of Heath.  WOOOOO!!!!

Overall Grade