"What exactly did you find off-putting?"

For brevity sake, the list of what I didn't find off-putting would be a more concise synopsis of this film.

The writing was appalling, the story bad, bad, bad. Russell Crowe, Russell Crowe, and Russell Crowe, and his earnest obsession with "making every English man stand tall" (as he said at the London opening). Please. This sort of romantic nationalist hero worshipping Hollywood crap is well past the use-by date in terms of film cliche. As I said, "Pirates of the Caribbean" with Geoffrey Rush was a much more entertaining depiction of the era, and a more honest one, frankly.

And about the 1812 enemy in hot pursuit being French...convenient in today's geopolitical terms, no? Hollywood bankrollers are, after all, very Republican creatures. Wouldn't want to tarnish the polish on the Anglo American alliance, now would we? This looked like a bad propaganda film from the 1940s.