Sons of Liberty

Sons of Liberty isn’t history exactly, but it’s a well-made dramatization that brings history to life.

Through a fast-moving combination of live action and CGI, Sons of Liberty shows how the point of no return became America’s starting point.

Viewers will get a kick out of how each character is portrayed from what we know today about them from history texts and biographies. Samuel Adams likes his beer, Benjamin Franklin his women and John Hancock his money.

Set aside the stunt casting worthy of a CW series and the detour into Lifetime territory. History’s Sons of Liberty, a three-night, six-hour scripted miniseries, crafts a compelling look at the men and the skirmishes that ignited the American Revolution.

If you want a history lesson, stay in school. Otherwise, there are enough facts in Sons of Liberty to add some ballast to a ripping good saga.

I could moan about how the History Channel is betraying scholarship, but you really ought not to turn to TV for history lessons anyway. What you get with Sons of Liberty is rowdy fun that ends with us Americans overthrowing foreign oppression.

Sons of Liberty has a fairly good look, although it certainly doesn't match the production value of a blockbuster film. It does have some solid writing and a few strong performances.

It's a cut above boilerplate, with good production values and decent performances.

Each episode is chock-full of the events that made it into American history textbooks--in addition to the Boston Tea Party, the second episode features Paul Revere’s ride and the battle at Lexington and Concord--but in between those scenes of warfare, Sons Of Liberty loses its momentum, especially as plots of personal intrigue are shoehorned in for salacious measure.

Although this miniseries stages large-scale action reasonably well (with the occasional lapse into visual clichés, such as the silent/slow-motion Boston Massacre) and has a marvelous atmospheric quality, it seems more generic and un-special the more conventionally "exciting" it's trying to be.

Sons of Liberty seems to get the broader strokes of history correct, but viewers who see the devil in the details will howl with laughter.

Sons of Liberty can’t match Vikings’ intensity, ferocity and full-immersion sense of place. Instead it’s a serviceable battle cry in some instances but rather laughable in others.

At its best, The Sons of Liberty captures in admirable detail the cleverness of the rebels, in their smuggling efforts and ability to amass and hide guns and ammunition, their personal bravery and astonishing commitment to a long-odds pursuit. If only their intelligence and ideology had been given the same, or indeed any, attention.

The action, not surprisingly, picks up considerably on the third and final night, with the full-scale outbreak of hostilities. Yet while those sequences are mounted with scope and considerable grit (seeking to preserve a lot of dead presidents, the project was shot in Romania), the exaggerated sense of drama--including the aforementioned and repeated use of slow mo--grows a bit tedious