Utterly inauthentic

Rating: 1/10 (15 July 2019)

I'd looked forward to seeing this film but was cruelly disappointed by its utter lack of authenticity. As 'Bob the moo' observes in his 2006 review, the depiction of Col. Tavington as stand-in for the historic commander of the British Legion -- 'Bloody Ban' Tarleton, so named by the rebels because of his mounted unit's massacre of retreating Virginia infantry reinforcements for the already captured defenders of Charleston who were surprised after dark by the Legion who were mostly Irishmen, not technically British.
The uniforms of Tarleton's legion were Green, not red, as depicted in the film. Martin, as an officer, would have been mounted, not fighting on foot as depicted. Cocked hats were worn by both civilians & military, but what is depicted are tri-corned hats, popular 20-50 years earlier. Round hats would've been far more common headgear for most rural Americans at this time (1779-81). The ambush of the British military escort by Martin & his two very young sons is absurd, as is his dispatching of several regular soldiers with a vintage tomahawk. Utterly unbelievable in what purports to be historical. This could have been a tragedy, which is what the revolution was for ordinary Americans, but the poor screenplay, poor costuming, & ridiculous events & dialogue turned what might've been a serious examination of the horrific terrors of the southern campaign into a jingoistic farce. The worst scene in the film was the burning of a rural church full of civilians by order of Col. Tavington. No such made murder of civilians ever occurred during the war. That sort of genocidal barbarity was only practiced by Americans against native American colonists & citizens a century before & after the Revolution.
There are many other inauthentic aspects to a film that falls very far short of historic fact, and that's a pity because reasonably accurate depictions of this period are extremely rare in feature films.