Too much ambition, little payout

Ugh, where to begin. Well, other posters hit the nail on the head with the flaws : bad costumes, bad dialogue, bad sets, bad script. I mean, come on : they had gold to work with: just knowing that Depardieu, Vincent Perez, Tim Roth and Jason Isaac were in this movie you would be expecting something epic. Sadly, it is not. Or maybe it is... or rather, how it was meant to be. The way I see it, the producers overshot their mark trying to make an epic movie (at least when it comes to the script). I mean, you have one of the most controversial yet engaging topics in colonial history, the Seven Years War. One can imagine a sweeping spectacle like Last of the Mohicans or another action-drama like The Patriot... Besides the former title, this period of history has barely had it's surface scratched for movie potential. It's a gold mine.
And so what really irks me with this movie is not the technical aspect of the movie itself (it is horrible, I agree). At the very base of the matter one should realize that the producers had terrific material to work with (just read into the French and Indian war and it's impossible not to bump into something worthy of a movie) and terrific actors. And what do they do with a win win combination? Manage to miraculously ignore these factors, extracting a sub-par mediocre story completely made up. Just when you think things are finally, f-i-n-a-l-y going to pick up (whether through displaying historical events or using their top name actors), the producers suddenly rush these through... SPOILER ALERT the 4 month siege of Quebec is relegated to a mere 15 seconds of seeing a couple of British soldiers firing canons in the dark... the British actors are cast perfectly as their characters, yet are only seen for less than 5 minutes... the whole movie revolves around the sap sap sap sap sap sap sap of the two main characters. And even this love story which is supposed to be engaging ends up ruined with all the plotholes and the tediousnous.
In conclusion, this movie suffers an identity crisis, not knowing whether it wants to be a historical epic, a love story, or a comedy (though I'm sure this last one is not intentional. But you gotta laugh at the shoddy filmmaking...) Their token big name actors are there just for promo, the plot holes are glaring, and the filmmakers display a blatant disregard for their source material (one being the spoken language : the French accent used here is neutral, if not European. The equivalent of having the Americans in the Patriot speaking with a thicker English accent than the Red Coats themselves).
If you have 3 hours to waste, do so watching this movie if you want, but be warned: it's a hopeless mess and any student of history will lament over the utter waste of potential this script idea had.