![]() The early scenes of Mutiny feel like they spring from nothing more than wary exchanged glances among the officers, all of them afraid of setting the captain off on another paranoid rant, and, in varying degrees, actively attempting to keep him from getting agitated. Clive (David Rintoul), the ship’s physician and close friend to the captain. Tiptoeing around Sawyer are First Lieutenant Buckland (Nicholas Jones), Second Lieutenant Bush (Paul McGann: Fairy Tale: A True Story), Third Lieutenant Hornblower, Fourth Lieutenant Archie Kennedy (Jamie Bamber) - Horatio’s pal from the HMS Indefatigable and the first series of films - Midshipman Wellard (Terence Corrigan), and Dr. ![]() While Sawyer plies the ordinary sailors with double rations of rum and allows them to fight to their hearts’ - and fists’ - content, he is snide and sarcastic with his officers, doling out excessive punishment for perceived infractions and seeing conspiracies in every private conversation. On a mission to the West Indies - to take advantage of the distraction a slave uprising is causing among the Spanish dons, with whom Britain is still at war - the Renown‘s senior officers find themselves enduring the increasingly erratic behavior of their commander, hero of the empire Captain James Sawyer (David Warner: Wing Commander, Titanic). Sir Edward, to put it mildly, is not pleased to see his young protege in the clink - “You’ll hang, hang!” he barks in a disappointed, fatherly rage, for “black, bloody mutiny.” But Horatio is no longer the callow youth to be cowed by a superior officer, even one whom he holds in such deep regard as Sir Edward, and as he tells his mentor of the “disaster” aboard the HMS Renown that led to his imprisonment, we begin to see how Horatio has matured in the three years since his last adventures. Mutiny opens in 1802, in Kingston, Jamaica, where Lieutenant Horatio Hornblower (Ioan Gruffudd: 102 Dalmatians, Solomon and Gaenor), in prison, receives a visit from his former commanding officer, now Commodore Sir Edward Pellew (Robert Lindsay: Fierce Creatures). Grimmer than the first series of films, which began with The Duel and ended with a 1999 Emmy for Best Mini-Series, Mutiny and its continuation, Retribution, throw Our Hero into moral quagmires unlike any he has faced before. And these new films offer the darker thrills of a Stevenson novel. ![]() Thankfully, A&E’s Hornblower movie series is back with two new installments, and settling in with them is almost as good as lying out in the backyard in the warm sun with a book that sweeps you up in rousing escapades and exotic locales. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower books - they’re another dose of adventure on the high seas that I could have used as a kid, and certainly lazy summer days are in shorter supply now that I’m a grownup. Treasure Island: is there a cooler book for a lazy summer day than that one? I wish someone had told me about C.S. As a kid, I loved Robert Louis Stevenson.
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