Stream It Or Skip It?

Somehow, quasi-historical action-dramas like William Tell (now streaming on Hulu) are still getting made, fairly lavish and elaborate Euro epics that aren’t cheap to make, a la recent productions of The Count of Monte Cristo or The Three Musketeers. There’s still an audience for this stuff, albeit one smaller than it was a decade or three ago – and an especially small audience for this particular story of the legendary Swiss archer who bullseyed an apple on top of his son’s head, and inspired the penning of a rather famous musical overture adopted as the theme to The Lone Ranger. Director Nick Hamm adapted the stage drama originally written by Friedrich Schiller in 1804, casting Claes Bang as the title hero who leads the liberation of his people from the tyranny of Austrian imperialists. Not many people seemed to care – it barely made a dent at the box office in any country – but it ain’t half bad for those of us with a soft spot for the they-can-take-our-lives-but-they-can’t-take-our-freedom genre.

The Gist: SWITZERLAND, 1307. This is a time when people still said thee and thy and thou, and before contractions were invented, so gird your loins for some choppy dialogue – although that’s clearly not the main draw. No, we’re here for the drawing of the bow, in this case the crossbow of William Tell (Bang), freshly loaded and pointed at an apple atop his son Walter’s (Tobias Jowett) head. DUM BA BUM go the wordless vocal emanations on the choir-led soundtrack. DUM BA BUM. Ready. DUM BA BUM. Aim. DUM BA BUM. Wait: A subtitle. THREE DAYS EARLIER. The movie does a thing that so many movies do – showing us part of the best part then flashing back to less-better parts, teasing us and holding us in suspense until we wrap back around to the best part. Are you really going to turn the movie off now, without seeing the big moment? Didn’t think so.

So this guy, Tell. He’s a former soldier, haunted by the brutality of the Crusades. He lives a peaceful life with his wife Suna (Golshifteh Farahani), who he met after he ceased slaughtering people in Palestine, and teenage son Walter. When he’s not feeding the goats and whatnot, he tinkers around in the shed with his crossbows. He’s the best shot ever. He’d very much rather show his kid how to kill game with a bolt than another man, but don’t worry, he’ll be forced to do that eventually, before the end of the movie, because his life is about to get a whole hell of a lot less peaceful. See, Austrian dictator King Albert (Ben Kingsley) has been encroaching on the Swiss and subjugating them. What’s his motive? Not quite sure, but the Austrians seem to see the Swiss as lessers, and may have an imperialism fetish. It also might be that King ’Bert’s insecure about his missing eyeball, which he covers up with a solid-gold eyepatch that boasts a rather off-putting prosthetic eye, but that’s just armchair psychoanalysis.

The shit starts to hit the fan once one of the king’s tax collectors rapes and murders a woman, and her humble Swiss farmer husband Baumgarten (Sam Keeley) vengefully slays the guy. Tell helps Baumgarten escape Austrian soldiers, and they get sucked into a brewing revolt against their dickweed oppressors. Chief among the dickweeds is Gessler (Connor Swindells), a sneering cretin deputized by the king to squash the rebellion. Gessler’s right-hand rat is Stussi (Jake Dunn), who’s worth mentioning simply because he has an even more punchable face than Gessler. Gessler lusts after the king’s niece, Princess Bertha (Ellie Bamber), who urges her uncle to ease off the Swiss; she’s secretly in love with Swiss nobleman Rudenz (Jonah Hauer-King), who wavers between acquiescing to Albert and fighting for his people’s liberty. They and other barely distinguishable characters play parts in the inevitable clash inspired by an act of defiance via William effing Tell and his deadeye effing shot – despite his insistence that he’s “nothing but a humble huntsman.” Like hell he is. DUM BA BUM.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: William Tell is a throwback to big sprawling sagas like Braveheart, which apparently inspired some of this movie’s gruesome depictions of limbs being hacked off. It’s also in the same vein of Ridley Scott stuff like Exodus: Gods and Kings, Robin Hood and Kingdom of Heaven, and please note that these are not among Scott’s best work.

Performance Worth Watching: The primary performances here are all quite good: Swindell’s snarl is admirably loathsome, Bang convincingly carries Tell’s quiet sense of honor and loyalty, and Kingsley chews a bit of scenery with aplomb. I liked Bamber and Farahani in key supporting parts, as women who aren’t afraid to get their hands very dirty, and inspire their men to action – a corny but effective plot component.

Memorable Dialogue: Tell: “I bend the knee to no man.”

Sex and Skin: Some decidedly unsexy dead-body nudity; a man doth getteth slain while taking a bath.

Our Take: William Tell boasts a goodly share of klutzy charm thanks to Bang’s performance and Hamm’s ability to effectively nurture suspense during key scenes – the core apple bit is quite excellent, he said with many apologies – and stage relatively dynamic action sequences. Sure, there are a few who-are-all-these-grubby-White-people moments of character confusion (it eventually sorts itself out, mostly), the sets look like Game of Thrones leftovers, some of the CGI backdrops are phony to the max and the tone of the dialogue is a near-unholy melange of Shakespeare and soap opera. And none of it is even remotely original, Hamm content to indulge neoclassical Ridley Scottisms in homage to a nearly extinct art of genre filmmaking. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, roughly akin to cracking open an endearingly musty old book for a good read instead of crafting your own epic tale. 

So, you’re inevitably thinking, you’re saying this is a Dad Movie. Bullseye, holmes. We’re a viable portion of the streaming-movie audience, y’know. We relish cheesy moments like Tell contemplating his old soldier armor, once splattered with blood and now mounted in the shed and lit in reverent hues like Batman’s costume, prompting introspective reflection on the horrors of the Crusades, leading to a strong dramatic scene in which Suna reminds him that their true, undying love sprung from that landscape of death. This is sturdy literary irony that Hamm finds time to develop, therefore lending dramatic oomph to Tell’s inevitable inspirational pre-battle speech, and balancing him out as a man of not just action, but humble nobility. 

Again, we’ve seen this character before in various iterations, all heavily histficced figures of myth and legend – I’m sure Mel Gibson embellished William Wallace in a similar manner, and I’m not just talking about his Pantene-commercial slo-mo shots, although ol’ Billy’s story absolutely wasn’t retrofitted with modern thinking like William Tell, which becomes a rumination on the reluctant necessity of violence. Of course, the irony is, without violence, the movie might be considerably less entertaining, which puts us firmly in the headspace of this version of Tell. Any lesson in cognitive dissonance these days is worth wrestling with. DUM BA BUM.

Our Call: The apples of this story might be getting soft, but Hamm made a pretty good baked crisp out of them. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.