There is a version of a George Washington movie that's just a greatest hits reel of things you learned in fourth grade. Young Washington is mostly not that. Jon Erwin's film drops you into the French and Indian War in 1753 and follows a 20-something George before he was anyone's idea of a founding father, when he was still getting rejected by the British Army for being a colonial and watching his plans fall apart in real time. It's a better starting point than the cherry tree myth, and Erwin deserves credit for going there.
William Franklyn-Miller carries the whole thing as Washington, and the early reviews calling him model-handsome aren't wrong, but he does more than just look the part. He gives George a quick temper and a genuine hunger that makes you believe why people started following this guy. The supporting cast stacked around him is genuinely wild for a faith-based studio release. Ben Kingsley, Andy Serkis, Kelsey Grammer, and Mary-Louise Parker all show up, and none of them are phoning it in. Grammer in particular is doing a whole thing as Lord Fairfax that's far more fun than it has any right to be.
The movie's climax lands on the Battle of the Monongahela in 1755, where General Braddock gets ambushed and killed, and Washington rallies what's left of the army to get everyone out. The film leans into the historical record here: Washington walked away from that fight with four bullet holes in his coat and two horses shot out from under him, completely unharmed. The movie frames this as divine providence, and that framing is either going to move you or make you roll your eyes depending on where you sit on that kind of thing. The film doesn't try to hide what it's doing.
The critical reception has been split right down the middle, sitting around 58% on Rotten Tomatoes. But audiences have responded completely differently, with a 92% audience score and an A CinemaScore from opening day crowds. That gap is familiar territory for Angel Studios, who pulled the same trick with Sound of Freedom. The movie earned over $20 million in its opening weekend, beating projections, which means people are genuinely going to see it.
Erwin previously directed I Can Only Imagine and Jesus Revolution, so if you know those films you already have a sense of the lane this is operating in. What's different here is the scale. The battle sequences are legitimately impressive on a big screen, and the film is paced tightly enough at two hours and five minutes that it never drags in the way these kinds of historical dramas usually do. It's not going to replace The Patriot on your annual Fourth of July rotation, but if you want something that actually puts George Washington in a war movie before all the mythology, this is the one.
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