The great Michael Gambon is totally wasted in 'The Last Great Warrior', an account of the settlement of America as one-dimensionally partisan as its title suggests. No-one is saying that the English did not do terrible things when they settled the American continent, but to suggest that the natives lived in some kind of paradisical bliss is equally absurd; moreover, the film supplements this simplification with a dangerously inaccurate implication, namely that the only good Englishmen were the ones who settled America! (bizarrely, the bad Englishmen kill all the natives with their diseases, while the Pilgrim Fathers live happily and healthily beside them). Granted, this is a children's film, but there's more depth and characterisation in an average episode of 'The Hoobs' than in this. But oddly, its flaws are no worse than those of supposedly sophisticated films like 'The Last of the Mohicans'. Smug liberalism may be preferable to the racist superiority of the John Wayne era; but how sadly rare it is to see a "Western" (to which genre this film essentially belongs, in spite of its east coast setting) that goes beyond a game of goodies and baddies. 'The Last Great Warrior' most certainly does not.
Review of Squanto: A Warrior's Tale
