Indian director Shekhar Kapur is famous for The Bandit Queen and is busy with the adaptation of Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom as we speak. In the meantime, we have his adaptation of AEW Mason’s 1901 novel The Four Feathers. Written while the British Empire was at its height, the novel is an unquestioning product of colonialism, as well as an unproblematic conflation of masculinity and militarism. Having chosen such an unlikely project, one might have thought Kapur would bring a sharp post-colonial eye to such ideological issues. One would be wrong.There is a clue to Kapur’s fast-and-loose approach (anything to keep the story bubbling) in his 1998 Elizabeth. In that mesmerising movie, Cate Blanchett plays the young Queen Elizabeth I, just starting out on her long career as monarch. It deals with her love affairs and with the political problems she faced, showing how Elizabeth goes from romantic young princess to the cold, hard, pale icon who was able to rule England for half a century and usher in a Golden Age. Except that Kapur and his scriptwriter Michael Hirst jumble the facts of Elizabeth’s reign, condensing events spread over its 45 years to the first few years after her ascension. They conflate and confuse the Earls of Leicester and Essex; they have Elizabeth dispense early on with her adviser Lord Cecil, who in fact served her till his death much later. She is courted, 20 years too early, by the Duc d’Anjou — now a transvestite! And so on. You expect the Spanish Armada to arrive a few decades ahead of itself, perhaps with cannon-bearing hot-air balloons in tow. Basically, Kapur’s Elizabeth is riveting cinema and more fantasy than history. I hope that when Kapur is done with Long Walk to Freedom it still bears some resemblance to the original. I have awful visions of Halle Berry playing Winnie Mandela as a gorgeous, fearless undercover spy with a penchant for clingy bathing suits, or a Robben Island sequence that has turned into The Prisoner of Zenda. I see Denzel Washington as Walter Sisulu facing off against Danny de Vito as Percy Yutar during the Rivonia Trial. Actually, perhaps that’s not a bad idea — except De Vito is far too good-looking to play Percy Yutar.In any case, what Kapur makes of The Four Feathers is nothing remotely resembling a revisionist view. Considering that this is the seventh time the movie has been made, you would have thought Kapur would try to put a new spin on it, but he is content to make a simple and simplistic epic. The movie, set in the 1880s, opens with a bone-crunching game of rugby played on the muddy fields of a military academy, and one hopes that an intriguing disquisition about sport and war, in the context of imperialism and masculinity, is on offer. But no. That is the movie’s last really interesting idea. Heath Ledger plays Harry Feversham, a young cadet engaged to be married to a whey-faced girl named Ethne (Kate Hudson). He is also the son of a famous general, so there’s parental pressure to go off and die for queen and country. But barely has he graduated than his regiment is sent to the Sudan, where a few Brits have recently been massacred by a bunch of crazy “Mahommedans” who do nothing but act like savages. Harry resigns his commission. Is he acting out of cowardice, or just good sense? Nowadays one presumes the latter, but it is still nonsensical to imagine that Harry couldn’t have foreseen his fellow soldiers’ response: three of them send him white feathers, an accusation of cowardice. It is Ethne who sends the fourth. Shamed, Harry sets off alone for the Sudan to redeem himself. Kapur’s epic is lavishly done, with sweeping vistas of the Sahara and at least one blood-pounding battle scene, in which British military arrogance is well skewered. (And they still had the Boers to face.) Kapur gets some exciting camera-work out of his cinematographer, especially during the battle, which is very expertly done, but not much more. The acting is solid at best, though Wes Bentley does reasonably well as Harry’s sensitive friend Jack. Hudson’s Ethne, focus of a turgid and tiresome romantic rivalry that nonetheless resolves itself in 30 seconds flat, is simply insufferable. What is perhaps most interesting about The Four Feathers, though, at least in Kapur’s version, is that none of Harry’s triumphs are possible without the assistance of a mysterious black warrior, Abou Fatma (Djimon Hounsou). Abou is the real pivot of the plot, the real hero of the story — and he’s a living, breathing concatenation of all those colonial stereotypes about the faithful black retainer who will unquestioningly do anything for the great white master. He is Umslopogaas to Harry’s Alan Quartermain, in Rider Haggard terms, except that luckily for him Abou doesn’t have to die for the white boss; he just has to get flogged, an experience he undergoes in stoic silence. He’s got lots of muscles, a rather camp outfit, with plenty of primitive jewellery, and a big sword. All Abou lacks is the slightest suspicion of a convincing motivation.