For audiences of a sure age, it is perhaps amusing, or perhaps even disappointing, when, early in “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” the eponymous hero skins a raccoon to vogue a bandage for a severe leg wound, moderately than to make a hat of the kind famously worn by Fess Parker when he performed the character in enduringly standard Disney miniseries and film spin-offs. Perhaps that is writer-director Derek Estlin Purvis’ means of winking on the viewers. Or, extra seemingly, it’s his means of letting us know from the get-go that this is not going to be your father’s King of the Wild Frontier.

William Moseley (“The Chronicles of Narnia”) is successfully earnest because the legendary frontiersman in Purvis’ leisurely paced however sporadically thrilling historic drama, which focuses on the interval when Crockett, then a member of the U.S. Home of Representatives for Tennessee, turned an outspoken critic of the 1830 Indian Elimination Act pushed by President Andrew Jackson (performed, fleetingly, by Edward Finlay with sufficient make-up to make him resemble a waxworks determine). But it surely’s co-star Colm Meany who dominates the movie along with his robustly villainous flip as Caleb Powell, a blustering rogue who operates his Center Tennessee crew of trappers for the Northeast Fur Buying and selling Firm with a whim of iron.  

Whereas Crockett is away on enterprise in Washington, D.C., his younger sons William (Nico Tirozzi) and John (Wyatt Parker) inadvertently incur Powell’s wrath by serving to themselves to a raccoon caught in considered one of his firm’s traps. Thoughts you, the boys aren’t thieves; they’re merely determined to offer meals for themselves and their bedridden ailing mother, Polly (Valerie Jane Parker). They determine nobody will miss only one pelt. They’re sadly mistaken.

Crockett gallops again residence when he receives phrase of his spouse’s sickness, however is interrupted alongside the way in which by a wolf assault — therefore the necessity for the coonskin-bandage — and a sidebar journey throughout which he defends a stray Indian (Gray Wolf Herrera) towards an assault by murderous members of one other tribe. (Not surprisingly, his beneficence cues a final-reel payback.)

By the point the frontiersman will get again to the household cabin, Powell has already tracked down the boys, whom he wrongly accuses of pilfering dozens of different pelts, and proclaimed they should work off their debt to him. When Crockett objects, Powell’s males give him a severe beatdown that ends solely after they assume he’s lifeless. This, too, is an enormous mistake.

All through a lot of “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” it’s onerous to shake the impression that an hour’s price of plot has been padded to characteristic size. However, the enlargement offers Purvis ample time to dwell on period-establishing and character-developing particulars usually glossed over in movies depicting the battle for survival in Nineteenth-century frontier days. Historical past buffs most likely gained’t be the one ones fascinated because the film slows down to point out how Crockett constructs a lean-to shelter within the wilderness whereas recovering from his accidents, and later manages to coax a wild horse to change into his alternative mount.

If impatient viewers desire to hit the fast-forward button whereas watching on nontheatrical platforms, effectively, they will nonetheless respect DP James King’s good-looking lensing of the locales in and round Kingston Springs, Tenn., and Stephen Keech’s appropriately old-school musical rating. Taylor Payments additionally deserves particular point out for the dramatically colourful illustrations over the opening credit.

Snippets of dialogue come throughout because the aural equal of purple prose, and it’s a lot to Moseley’s credit score that he maintains a straight face and an authoritative demeanor when he delivers traces like, “I can’t shield my household from civil males. How am I going to guard the nation from savages?” Or, higher nonetheless, “If I go away you untethered, will I’ve to take care of you once more?”

However Meany stays the principle attraction right here, enjoying the Irish-accented and incongruously top-hatted Powell with such scenery-chewing relish that you simply half-expect to see different actors nibbled upon. When he bellows, “I’ll have my pound of flesh,” he sounds much less like a Shakespearean wannabe than a monstrously ravenous fiend. Deep down, you already know somebody like that often will get what’s coming to him in a film like this. However there are moments when you might surprise: Perhaps not this time?