The Four Feathers (2002)
Starring Heath Ledger, Wes Bentley, Kate Hudson, Djimon Hounseau, Michael Sheen.
Directed by Shekhar Kapur.
Rated PG-13.
Grade: D
"Above all, remember that you are a Christian soldier."
About ninety minutes into The Four Feathers, I scribbled down the words "lost me" and shut my notebook. Shekhar Kapur's follow-up to his elegant Elizabeth is a shapeless, sloppy, incoherent mess, with no sense of continuity and some of the year's worst acting. The movie is just one awful miscalculation after another; simply nothing works, not the script, not the camerawork, not even the musical score. And to add to the list of disgraces, the MPAA has clearly gone out of its collective mind rating this hard-core war movie PG-13, and that isn't coming from the CAPAlert guy.
It is difficult to give a plot summary because plot is so sorely lacking. I did sort of like the opening scenes, in which a young British soldier named Harry (Heath Ledger) quits the army when his regiment is shipped off to fight in Sudan immediately after his engagement to the beautiful Ethne (Kate Hudson). In response, three of his fellow soldiers each send him a white feather, a shaming sign of cowardice in the British army. When Ethne finds out what he has done and why, she adds a fourth.
Deciding that he will not be able to look at himself in the mirror if he remains in England, Harry sets off to Sudan. When his desert guide is killed, he proceeds on his own, only to collapse from thirst and exhaustion a few short miles down the sand dunes. He meets a friendly native named Abou (Djimon Hounseau), who insists that he will protect him because "God put you in my way." Uh huh.
Not even the great and powerful Abou can stop Harry from being taken prisoner, sold as a slave, etc. At one point, he even winds up leading the enemy army, though I have yet to figure out how that little plot twist came to be. Meanwhile, his friends in the British army, with the possible exception of best buddy Jack (Wes Bentley), are portrayed as by turns idiotic, sadistic, incompetent and horribly racist.
Kapur directs with no sense of chronology. It's one thing to fracture continuity; quite another to leap about like an irritated horse, skipping sections entirely then coming back to them in clumsy, unnecessary flashbacks. The movie makes it deliberately difficult to decipher the sequence of events, and there's no reason for that: this is a straightforward story, and the complications Kapur adds have no artistic bearing on anything.
The Four Feathers features atrocious performances from a cast of reliable actors. Heath Ledger is tolerable as the long-suffering protagonist, but Wes Bentley doesn't have a believable moment as his self-righteous best friend. When his character goes blind in the film's final scenes, I got the urge to giggle. And Kate Hudson is irritatingly earnest, so utterly devoid of personality that it isn't clear why all the men in the movie are all over her.
Djimon Hounseau is occasionally amusing as the friendly native, but his character is that old standby, the black sage. After the sound drumming that the stereotype received with the release of The Legend of Bagger Vance, one would think that it would go out of style, but no: Abou is just a less loquacious version of Bagger himself, though one who occasionally picks up an axe and starts chopping away.
Aside from a few notable set pieces, this one of the worst cases of "sophomore slump" that I have witnessed. The Four Feathers is flabby and unfocused, telling a simple story in an absurdly convoluted way. It is also the only war epic I've seen in which the climax involves head-butting and biting to the delight and laughter of the audience. I had already closed my notebook.