‘The Ballad of Davy Crockett’ Review: Passable Historical Drama Imagines an Early Adventure of the Legendary Frontiersman
variety.comJoe Leydon Film Critic For audiences of a certain age, it might be amusing, or maybe even disappointing, when, early in “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” the eponymous hero skins a raccoon to fashion a bandage for a serious leg wound, rather than to make a hat of the sort famously worn by Fess Parker when he played the character in enduringly popular Disney miniseries and movie spin-offs.
Maybe this is writer-director Derek Estlin Purvis’ way of winking at the audience. Or, more likely, it’s his way of letting us know from the get-go that this will not be your father’s King of the Wild Frontier.
William Moseley (“The Chronicles of Narnia”) is effectively earnest as the legendary frontiersman in Purvis’ leisurely paced but sporadically exciting historical drama, which focuses on the period when Crockett, then a member of the U.S.
House of Representatives for Tennessee, became an outspoken critic of the 1830 Indian Removal Act pushed by President Andrew Jackson (played, fleetingly, by Edward Finlay with enough makeup to make him resemble a waxworks figure).
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