Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

A Masterpiece!

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

"Ride with the Devil" was a major box office bomb when released in 1999. While not exactly a poor film, Ang Lee's well meaning but rather unentertaining Civil War epic doesn't seem to offer much flesh on the bones, despite starting intriguing enough, with a premise that promises much but fails to deliver later in the engagement factor.The film, based on James Schamus's screenplay on a nonfiction book, has an interesting slant on Civil War history, presenting the perspective of the Bushwhackers, of which the two principal leads are members of. However, after building up an engrossing start, the screenplay meanders into a romantic affair between Jack Bull Childs (Skeet Ulrich) and young widow Sue Lee Shelley (Jewel, in a quite admirably film debut). By the time the film depicts the Lawrence massacre, after some skirmishes and fights between the Bushwhackers and Jayhawkers, the movie begins to drag in an unnecessary romantic relationship between Shelley and Jake Roedel (Tobey Maguire), ending in a whimper rather than in a bang unlike most war epics.The film is more philosophical than most, and asks pertinent questions about racism, the nature and brutality of war and why and how it demonizes ordinary citizens. Yet three quarters into the film. the Lawrence massacre seems more like a standard trope scene in American war movies without presenting any fresh perspective, other than the rather generic "war always makes another man a bad guy". Ideally this sort of movie needs a Sam Fuller (or John Ford) to grab the audience by the collar or by the throat with visceral gutsiness; Ang Lee's film and screenplay seem too tame--well meaning though it is--and presents the Civil War with a tagged-on romance, a well executed but clearly a "cinematic" account of a war crime. It doesn't feel like the real thing, and doesn't convince.The performances all round is good, but Ang Lee's movie could gain with more in-your-gut visuals and quicker editing rather than narrative meanderings. I wish I could give this movie a higher rating but it is ultimately a little bland and unsatisfactory--perhaps more is required from this talented director and the scriptwriter team, which haven't seem to develop the screenplay sufficiently here to justify its two and half hours in the Director's Cut.

I've seen this movie several times. I've read a few books about William Quantrill, so the movie interested me. And while Quantrill's character is a small part of the movie, I thought it was a very good period piece filled with rich dialog that seemed to be of the time. The friendship between the characters Tobey Maguire and Skeet Ulrich play cements the story. This is the first movie I saw Jeffrey Wright in, and his performance as the willfully loyal Holt is first-rate, probably the best acting in the movie. My favorite scene is at the end of the movie when Jake Roedel and Holt part ways. It's a bittersweet moment that didn't much dialog.

I was interested in "Ride with the Devil", because it promised to focus on one aspect of the American Civil War that hasn't been depicted a great deal of times in other Civil War movies, the Bushwackers who were independent of the Confederate army and who raided the north. But in the end, I found the movie to be greatly uneven. On the positive side, the movie feels authentic, from the props and costumes to the locations chosen. The acting by all the players is also professional and helps sell the characters the actors play. On the other hand, the screenplay misses some key moments that might have given the characters more detail. For instance, we see precious little of the hero before the incident that pushes him to be a raider, and then the movie skips a year ahead to show him in midstream. A bigger problem is that the movie is too long. While the movie never gets to the point of being boring, it seems to be taking its sweet time during many moments. The movie also ends at a point that kind of leaves its characters hanging; I would have liked to have seen a more definite resolution. This is not an awful movie, but it's greatly uneven, and I can understand why despite its strengths, the major Hollywood studio that bankrolled the movie in the end only gave it a limited theatrical release.

Hollywood gets its fact mostly right in this entertaining civil war film,what a shock, but unsurprisingly it was a box office flop and is hardly ever shown what a pity it really is a good film. the characters are a bit goody goody but the use of the black character 'hope' is loosely based on an actual black tracker that rode with quantrell's raiders.i think this movie ranks alongside films such as 'gods and generals' and the fantastic 'gettysburg' as a great civil war film.Toby Maguire might seem an unlikely choice as 'jake'the main character but he seems to pull it off but as an Englishman i cant comment on the accuracy of the accents.