William Franklyn-Miller plays the title icon as model-handsome and moody, with a cast of supporting scowlers featuring Ben Kingsley and Andy Serkis.
Plus IconOwen Gleiberman
Chief Film Critic
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Pat Redmond “Young Washington” is like one of those great-man biographies you read in grade school. Released by Angel Studios for the Fourth of July, the movie is intended as a bit of likably square, neo-traditional, right-wing-adjacent counterprogramming. But say this much for it: In its life-of-an-American-plaster-saint way, Jon Erwin’s coming-of-age military adventure film doesn’t make being George Washington look any easier than it was.
The heart of the movie takes place in 1755, at the start of the French and Indian War, when Washington, 23 years old, has been made an officer of the British Army, though only because he has taken a position that no one else wants: leading a militia of 150 volunteers into the Ohio Territory to wrest the land from the French, who’ve begun to put down stakes there. The first battle is a bloodbath, with the men picked off by musket fire almost at random. But not Washington. He’s so valiant he seems almost mystically protected.
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