Texas Rising

The action is so saddled with laughable dialogue and dreadful pacing that not even Paxton's always entertaining scene-chewing can make this inherently interesting tale pop as it should. [29 May/5 Jun 2015, p.98]

Texas Rising doesn’t have the urgency of “Hatfields vs. McCoys,” but Texas enthusiasts will enjoy the blow-by-blow reenactments of a crucial period in American history.

Texas Rising is tonally challenged in a way that regularly undercuts its own inherent drama.

Richly textured and enjoyable if wildly uneven, the star-studded series tries to marry the hard-nosed, brutally violent realism of modern TV to an antique--some would say antiquated--aesthetic of genteel mannerisms and off-the-wall humor prevalent during the first golden age of TV in the 1950s and '60s.

At least in the first two episodes sent to critics, the miniseries misses a potentially rich opportunity to tell more nuanced and, hence, more compelling stories of the players in this great, early drama of Texan and American history.

By the end of Chapter Two, many viewers might well be in the mood to detour elsewhere rather than follow Houston’s plea to “follow me a little longer down this twisted, bloody road.”

As directed by Roland Joffe (The Killing Fields), Rising has some entertaining shoot-‘em-ups and showdowns, but Joffe is hobbled by the script, which forces him to cut away from Houston to give equal weight to Olivier Martinez’s Santa Anna, the leader of the Mexican army and president of the country, and the subject of some of Rising’s most tedious storytelling.

The result is just a disjointed collection of clichés, often staged with the clumsiness of bad community theater.

What should be a sweeping, exciting epic about Texas' fight for independence instead comes off as a muddled cross between a costume party and historic re-enactors convention.

Nobody fares particularly well here, due largely to a script credited to exec producer Leslie Greif, Darrell Fetty and George Nihil. That said, the wholly one-dimensional way the Mexicans are depicted is troublesome.