Hollywood entirely skipped America's 250th anniversary. Walk into a theater this July 4th weekend, and you won't find a single big-studio historical epic celebrating the birth of the nation. The major networks and legacy studios simply sat this one out. That left a massive, wide-open lane for Angel Studios and the Wonder Project to step in with Young Washington, an ambitious attempt to give the first president a gritty, high-stakes origin story.
On paper, this sounds like a massive win for audiences starving for a traditional historical drama. Director Jon Erwin, riding high on hits like Jesus Revolution, traded modern faith narratives for the muddy, bloody battlefields of the French and Indian War. He brought along an insanely decorated supporting cast including Ben Kingsley, Andy Serkis, Kelsey Grammer, and Mary-Louise Parker. The hype was real. The trailers promised a sweeping, action-packed look at a young soldier before he became a monument.
Instead, we got a film that feels less like a cinematic event and more like a beautifully shot Sunday school lesson. Young Washington isn't an outright disaster, but it suffers from a fatal flaw. It tries so hard to make George Washington relatable to a modern crowd while simultaneously treating him like an untouchable saint that it completely strips away his humanity. It's a stiff, overly earnest slog that mistakes historical trivia for dramatic tension.
The Flawed Search for a Relatable Founding Father
We usually think of George Washington as the stern, white-haired old man staring blankly from the dollar bill. He feels distant, cold, and flawless. The script tries to smash that perception by focusing on his early twenties. This is the Washington who made massive military blunders, got his troops massacred at Fort Necessity, and accidentally helped spark a global war between Britain and France.
That's a fantastic setup for a movie. It gives you a flawed protagonist who has to learn from devastating failure. For the first twenty minutes, you think you're actually getting that movie. William Franklyn-Miller plays Washington as an ambitious, somewhat awkward, and fiercely defensive young man desperate to escape the shadow of his family's modest colonial status. He wants money, land, and military glory. He's kind of annoying, which is historically accurate.
The problem is that the movie refuses to let him stay human. Every time Washington makes a mistake, the script rushes in to tell the audience that it's all part of a grand, divine plan. Instead of letting the character suffer the consequences of his arrogance, the film frames his failures as necessary stepping stones toward his ultimate destiny. This completely kills the stakes. If a character is bulletproof because the script keeps screaming that he's chosen by God, you stop worrying about whether he survives the next ambush.
A Script Trapped in Repetitive Clichés
Jon Erwin and his co-writers seem terrified that the audience won't get the point of the movie. To solve this, they rely on a single metaphor and beat it into the dirt. Early in the film, we get a line about how even a pawn can take a king. It's a fine sentiment for a movie about an underdog colonial fighting European superpowers.
They repeat this line constantly. Characters say it to Washington. Washington mutters it to himself. It appears in emotional confrontations. By the third time someone brought up the pawn and the king, I wanted to walk out to the lobby and buy an overpriced box of candy just to escape the dialogue.
This heavy-handed writing ruins what could have been great dramatic scenes. At one point, Washington declares that he would rather die unknown than live believing the world's measure of him is fixed. It sounds like a caption on an inspirational social media post, not something a sweaty, stressed-out 22-year-old soldier would say while hiding in a ditch on the Virginia frontier. The dialogue doesn't sound like historical speech, nor does it sound like natural human conversation. It sounds like a series of mission statements.
The Shocking Bright Spots in a Dull Frame
The real tragedy of the film is that the technical elements are actually quite good. Kristopher Kimlin's cinematography captures the brutal, dense wilderness of the Ohio River Valley with remarkable texture. The movie was filmed largely in Ireland and Virginia, and it shows. The forests look damp, cold, and unforgiving. The mud looks thick. The battle scenes, particularly the climactic ambush at the Monongahela, have a chaotic, terrifying energy that briefly wakes the movie up.
The supporting cast also does everything they can to inject life into the dry script. Andy Serkis is fantastic as General Edward Braddock, the arrogant British officer who refuses to listen to provincial advice about frontier warfare. Serkis brings a blustering, tragic stubbornness to the role that gives the film its only true sense of dramatic weight. When Braddock falls, you feel the loss of a real person, which is more than you can say for most of the other characters.
Mary-Louise Parker does what she can with the thankless role of Mary Ball Washington, George's notoriously difficult mother. The historical Mary was a demanding, cold woman who constantly complained about money and showed little interest in her son's military triumphs. The film softens her significantly, turning her into a source of wise, providential guidance. It's a waste of Parker's talents, transforming a complex historical figure into a generic, supportive cinematic mother.
The Bizarre Accent Choices
We have to talk about William Franklyn-Miller's performance. He certainly looks the part. He has the height, the striking features, and the physical presence required to play a young Virginia planter turned soldier. He handles the physical demands of the action scenes well.
His accent is another story. Franklyn-Miller is British, and his attempt at a colonial Virginia dialect is totally distracting. It wavers between modern mid-Atlantic, standard British theatrical speech, and a strange, breathy cadence that sounds like he's trying to remember his lines while running a marathon.
Every time he opens his mouth to deliver a grand speech about liberty or destiny, the illusion shatters. You don't see George Washington; you see a young actor working very hard in front of a green screen or a well-dressed set. A movie like this relies entirely on the audience buying into the reality of the lead character, and the vocal performance pulls you out of the experience time and time again.
Why Patriotic Cinema Keeps Stumbling
The failure of Young Washington highlights a broader issue with independent, crowd-funded, or faith-adjacent cinema. Studios like Angel have mastered the art of mobilizing an audience. They know exactly how to market to people who feel ignored by mainstream Hollywood. The "Pay It Forward" system ensures their movies sell tickets and fill seats, regardless of what critics think.
But making a movie that people want to support ideologically is different from making a movie that is good. When your primary goal is to inspire or instruct, art takes a backseat. You start cutting corners on character development because you assume the audience already loves the protagonist. You avoid showing real flaws because you don't want to tarnish the message.
The best historical dramas work because they treat historical figures as people first and symbols second. Look at Spielberg's Lincoln. That movie succeeded because it showed a tired, politically manipulative man arguing in smoky rooms, not a marble statue delivering speeches. Young Washington does the exact opposite. It takes a fascinating, deeply flawed young man and encases him in marble before the first act is even over.
Skip the Theater and Try These Instead
Don't waste fifteen dollars on a theater ticket for a movie that feels like a lecture. If you want to celebrate the nation's history this weekend with stories that actually have teeth, you have far better options available at home.
- Watch the John Adams miniseries on Max. It remains the gold standard for early American history on screen. It shows the founders as dirty, argumentative, brilliant, and deeply flawed human beings. The relationship between Adams and Washington in that series tells you more about leadership than the entire two-hour runtime of this new film.
- Read Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow. If you want the actual story of Washington's wild, terrifying years in the French and Indian War, skip the cinema and read the first few hundred pages of this biography. The real story of his survival, his near-misses with death, and his early political maneuvering is ten times more thrilling than anything Jon Erwin put on screen.
- Stream The Last of the Mohicans. If you just want a great action movie set during the French and Indian War with incredible music, gorgeous cinematography, and a real sense of stakes, Michael Mann's classic still holds up perfectly.
