Drummer Boy tells a couple of stories, about the pull of freedom in a fight against tyranny and about faith in the face of certain doom, and considering what studio is behind the movie and whom it was directed by and stars, one can probably guess which of those two stories is the more important one to screenwriter Robert L. Ramsey and fraternal directors Ben and Joel David Smallbone. The latter of those directors, by the way, also stars as the elder of two brothers who, in this story set some months or years into the Revolutionary War, find themselves on opposite sides of a geopolitical conflict. There is potential in a story like this, and there is possibly even more in a thread that threatens to be sidelined by the film’s strange priorities.
Twelve years after they arrived in the New World (in a prologue that establishes a life-altering injury for the other brother and a tragedy that will come to define them both), we properly meet Jeremiah (played by the co-director) and Benjamin Clem (Lucas Leach). The former falls in love with the pretty and well-born Lady Elizabeth (Beth Easdown), despite his own lowly status, which has fallen since that tragedy and the near-poverty that has resulted from it. Her father is a military officer of some renown (played by Charles Esten), but he seems to have instilled certain virtues and values in his daughter that only reveal themselves to be more venomous as the story takes a turn in the second half.
A romantic triangle develops, though, when Emmalin (India Brown), an enslaved woman in Elizabeth’s household (Beverley Knight plays the only other one we meet, named Margaret) who grew up with both of the brothers and learned to read using the Holy Bible as a reference, begins to make some moves both to free herself and to prove herself a better fit than her master’s daughter. A surprising amount of the movie is dedicated to this thread of the two (or, perhaps, two-and-a-half) storylines when Jeremiah goes off to war and Emmalin decides to respond to his letters, passing herself off as Elizabeth in the process. It helps that this is a well-wrought role, a woman whose strength and determination are broadly aspirational (though a late-film revelation about heritage is quite a stretch of the imagination).
It’s around here that we should probably bring up the fact that the film is a musical, with some original songs provided by the co-director/star and his other brother Luke in their capacity as the Christian pop duo For King & Country. They are all, uniformly, dull and bland in both the obvious lyrics and in the directors’ staging of them as interruptions in conversations between the characters or, in a couple of instances, a montage or two amid the fighting on the battlefield. The pop stylings are merely distracting, too, from the attempt at a sort of grit elsewhere on the screen, what with the clean production and the muddy mixing that often means the music swallows up the lyrics.
Anyway, the other half of the story involves those battles, which both brothers find their way into—Jeremiah fighting for the British under Elizabeth’s father and Benjamin acting as the drummer boy for the American rebels (though led by a Scottish expat, played by a very good Iain Glen). The latter’s position is on account of that injury, which was a rather nasty one to his leg when he was a child. Back home, the brothers’ mother (played by Melora Hardin) wanders around, occasionally singing random refrains of a few of the songs and looking worried.
If the film is slightly better than this review has made it sound, it’s because Ramsey really has woven some tales driven by genuine emotion and dramatic heft at their best moments. Those moments, it is true, belong mostly to Emmalin’s journey toward freedom, which is fraught with strain and uncertainty and defined by Brown’s solid performance. Back on the battlefield, the movie even manages some minor comic relief, in the form of a pair of soldiers played by Scott Folan and Harry Simkins, that results in some actual wit.
The final refrain, too, which incorporates the tune suggested by the title in a sequence of reckless courage that manages to be rousing in spite of its wholesale ridiculousness, is a glimpse at what the music in this movie might have conjured under subtler direction. Drummer Boy might be halfway convincing as a period drama, but as a musical—which it is to an equal, if not greater, degree—it’s an awkward anachronism.
Rating: **½ (out of ****)
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