The Avenging Angel
The Avenging Angel
| 22 January 1995 (USA)
The Avenging Angel Trailers

Miles Utley is a professional Mormon commando/bodyguard who is forced to turn renegade and to question his faith as he investigates a scandal involving assassination and land speculation.

Reviews
Incannerax What a waste of my time!!!
Aneesa Wardle The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.
Ezmae Chang This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.
Brooklynn There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.
kjwallace-2 Yes this film was based on a fictitious figure yet cannot be written off as untrue. There was an organization known as the Danites and no Joseph Smith did not immediately disband them and condemn them, in fact, he attended some of the meetings. He did disband them once he saw the true scope of activities and he excommunicated the band leader Joseph Avaard, however, Orrin Porter Rockwell, who is portrayed in the movie, was indeed a member of the Danites and was Joseph and Brigham's personal body guard. I feel the movie was more about Porter than Miles Utley and Bill Hickman was also real. In fact, Miles was about the only character who was made up. The attempts against Brigham's life were real and the internal leadership struggles were real. The Mountain Meadow Massacre is a perfect example of the type of nervous hair trigger leadership that prevailed in the early days of the church after the martyrdom of the prophet and the cowardly murder of P.P.Pratt in Arkansas. Though Grigham was exonerated for the attack on the Arkansas wagon train, the crime was perpetrated by leaders of the local church concerned about the wagon train proceeding to California, raising a militia and returning bent on sacking the outlying Mormon communities. They mercilessly murdered men women and children thinking the general leadership would condone the act but were seriously flawed in their judgment. This movie gives us a glimpse into the paranoid mentality of the epoch and I think it is well worth the time to watch.
Dark Ages Well, I have another opinion. I don't like this movie at all. Actually, I rate it like 2 out of 10. Frankly, the only good about it was the Bad Boys trailer before the movie. It's make me compare Will Smith with this boring and stiff actor in Tom Berrenger. I think the story is complicated, I didn't know about the Mormons etc. Bad acting overall. Miles Utleys (Berrenger) drunken father does not look that old to be Utleys father in my book. Then we have this very sentimental ending with all the ....Yeah yeah, I will not appeal anything. I would not recommend this tragic movie to anyone else rather than the very greatest fans of Tom Berrenger. Don't waste your time watching this since the are so many other classic western out there.
clwhittom If you are not an over sensitive Mormon, trying to justify your religion, you will enjoy this movie. It's just what a Tom Berenger movie should be, filled with action and interesting characters. The story line is very unique and interesting.
rockhound-1 First of all, it's been a while since I saw this movie. So, I may be wrong about this, but one of the other reviewers mentions the "trek of the Mormons to Utah in the 1870's...." By the 1870's the Transcontinental Railroad had been completed. Therefore, during this period of time the trek to Utah consisted of hopping on the next train and riding it to the territory. The trek portrayed in the movie actually took place around 30 years earlier.My next criticism is that the "Avenging Angel" as portrayed in this movie never existed. They are loosely based on a group of renigade Mormons that existed for a short time while the Mormons were living Northern Missouri in the late 1830's. This group was more commonly known as the Danites. The Danites did commit crimes against both Mormons and Non-mormons of the area. However, the Church never sanctioned their activities. As a matter of fact, the first that the then Mormon prophet, Joseph Smith, had heard of the activities of the Danites was when the organization's leader and founder, Sampson Avard, gave perjurious testimony accusing Smith of having been complicit in their crimes. Avard gave this testimony in order to save his own neck. Once their activities became known, the Danites were disbanded and were never reconstituted.Another inaccuracy is that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints never sanction murder. There were several times that various groups used violence against members of the church and the Church sanctioned violence used by the members to defend them selves, but only in their defense, only when the Church?s enemies we in the act of physically threatening the saints.Finally, their is no evidence the Orin Porter Rockwell (Coburn's character) was ever a member of the Danites. He was a bodyguard to both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young (Heston's character). He was a gun fighter reputed to have killed more men than Wyett Earp, Doc Holladay, Batt Masterson, and Tom Horn combined. He was fiercely loyal to the Church and its leaders. However, he was never party to cold-blooded murder.In short, I think that this movie would have been better if they had just used wholly fictitious characters and settings. The mixture of real people with an otherwise whole fictitious story only serves to perpetuate false ideas about the society that existed in 19th-century Utah.