LOVE AND HONOR

A dashing colonial American officer travels to Russia to persuade Catherine the Great not to help the British defeat the American rebellion.

You know Russia’s a tough place when 24-year-old Captain Keiran Selkirk, en route to St. Petersburg, watches his boisterous comrade in arms, Count Gorlov, save their sleigh from a pack of wolves by tossing a hapless passenger over the side. From such gory beginnings, screenwriter (Braveheart; Pearl Harbor) and novelist Wallace (So Late Into the Night, 1983, etc.) introduces a Russia of 1774 that is almost comically brutal, ludicrously sentimental, unknowably vast, riddled with rebellion, and so intensely bound up in European intrigues that it’s a wonder Benjamin Franklin would send only one man to argue against a British plan to acquire 20,000 Russian troops for keeping order in the American colonies. Captain Selkirk is unspeakably handsome, a superb fighter (he polishes off a band of marauding Cossacks), reasonably adept at several languages, and a widower—perfect for the scheming females hovering about Catherine’s court. Invited immediately to the French ambassador’s ball, he becomes infatuated with the daughter of the British ambassador, Lord Settlefield, who seems aware of Selkirk’s mission but won’t reveal how Selkirk will be thwarted. Then Selkirk and Gorlov are asked to protect a gaggle of young aristocratic females. That trip runs afoul of Cossacks and, after performing with suitable bravery, Selkirk is saved from certain death by the bravery of Beatrice, a servant to one of the Russian princesses. Before Selkirk’s burgeoning romantic interest in Beatrice can develop, however, he and Gorlov are sent by Potemkin to put down a Cossack rebellion. Selkirk slices a Cossack in half but almost dies from a bullet wound. His bravery wins him an audience with Catherine the Great—in her bedchamber. Will Selkirk’s homespun innocence, spunk, and naiveté triumph on this very different battlefield?

Breezily paced and improbably plotted costume epic, with an ending only Hollywood could love.