Although it starts out with author Rudyard Kipling as a gung-ho imperialist, there is redemption in its final scenes as he realizes the consequences of his pride. As said, it is an excellent film in all respects: acting, especially by David Haig as Rudyard Kipling, who also wrote the screenplay equally impressively. The music score by Adrian Johnston is both rich and somber and ultimately moving. The cinematography is stunningly beautiful and the art direction is brilliant and gritty. Daniel Radcliffe (John 'Jack' Kipling) is more than Harry Potter and shows his acting chops here, as do Kim Cattrall (Caroline Kipling), Carey Mulligan (Elsie 'Bird' Kipling) and Martin McCann (Bowe of the Irish Guard), who relates the details of what happened to Jack. This is an entertaining message movie.

The first important role for Daniel Radcliffe as an actor was certainly his opportunity to play Harry Potter, the magical boy attending a parochial school for wizards. His second may be this role as a young officer commissioned to fight and risk his life in the Great War. This part allowed Radcliffe to spread his acting wings and prove he has a range and ability that goes beyond Hogwarts. Radcliffe will probably always be grateful to Harry Potter but he needed a role to branch out into other challenging worlds.The setting is a 180-degree turn from Harry Potter: the early days of World War I in Britain, circa 1914. As the title character of a period piece, Radcliffe plays Jack Kipling, a young man caught up in the fervor that swept British youth at the outbreak of the "war to end all wars". The army at first rejects him because of his eyesight, but his father, the immortal Rudyard Kipling, played with equal fervor by David Haig, pulls certain strings to get his son into basic training and eventually the western front. But his wife, played brilliantly by Kim Cattrall, and their daughter, played with beautiful subtlety by Carey Mulligan, are devastated by their attitude about Jack's entering the war.In a particularly fine sequence of scenes, when Radcliffe leaves his family to enter basic training, he seems like a boy about to go to school for the first time. But when he returns home as an officer, his demeanor has become that of a man. Radcliffe does a fine job of displaying the subtle transformation from adolescence to maturity. Jack becomes an officer before he is 18 years old. The film then moves between the home of the Kiplings in a beautiful manor in rural England and the devastating world of trench warfare on the western front.A fine film all around, and again, a breath of fresh air for the likes of Radcliffe who has proved that he can play parts quite removed from fantasy. Radcliffe will probably enjoy a long and fruitful career. Harry Potter certainly spring-boarded him into an acting career. But Jack Kipling helped him establish that he can swim in deeper waters.

As a Kipling fan from the age of 8, 50 years and more ago now, I was knocked out by "My Boy Jack." David Haig, as writer and actor, is beyond brilliance, and though I found Daniel Radcliffe a bit stiff and modern, he too was excellent.Kim Cattrall: surprisingly good. But I was totally distracted by her American pretending to be English pretending to be American bizarre accent. Let her use her natural speech (and yes, I know she was born and spent time in England) or else hire a good dialogue coach.Though the whole production was gorgeous (Bateman's!) and moving in its interrelationships, the bookending of the scenes with friends King George V and Rud just tore my heart out. The King having just lost a "boy Jack" of his own (young Prince John, an epileptic, subject of another fantastic Masterpiece series, "The Lost Prince", some years ago), Rudyard recites the poem he wrote for his Jack. I sobbed through the whole recital, and was still weeping when I went to sleep a few hours later. Staggeringly wondrous. And cathartic in the sense in which all tragedies should be. Fine, fine work by all concerned.

David HAIG looks remarkably like Rudyard Kipling and gives a very strong performance, energetic and somewhat eccentric and overbearing at times, but always with a firm grip on his characterization of the man who did all he could to help his son enter the military during World War I.All the other performances are valid enough and DANIEL RADCLIFFE does a decent job as Kipling's eighteen year-old son, Jack, whose bad eyesight makes him a bit risky for serving in the military. Eventually, of course, he does become a leader of men during the trench warfare in France where he is injured and killed during combat. Thereafter, the conflict in the household comes to a core, with both Kipling's wife and daughter opposing the decision that Kipling made to push his son into service.The battle scenes are well staged, but unlike others who say there is no Harry Potter in Radcliffe's performance, I beg to differ. He has the eyeglasses, the same earnest expression and wide-eyed look that he had as Potter, the same unlined face, and not a great range of expressions. And neither did Potter. He gives a good performance but is clearly an actor whose range has not yet been tested, at least on film.The weakest aspect of the story is the last half, which dwells with too much constancy on the grieving family so that it becomes too maudlin before the conclusion.