‘The Last of the Mohicans’

This 1992 release comes at you like a tomahawk. Hard, fast and brutal, it slashes and leaves you for dead. Undeniably exciting as this definitely is, its impact comes at the expense of some of the gentler virtues, qualities that even top-drawer barn-burners really shouldn’t ignore. Unashamedly based more on the 1936 movie version than the James Fenimore Cooper novel, it takes place in 1757 during the French and Indian War, when those two sides united in an attempt to drive the British, who had tribal allies of their own, out of North America. A lean and steely-eyed Daniel Day-Lewis stars as Hawkeye, colonial-born but raised as the adopted son of the Mohicans’ chief. Directed by Michael Mann (Cinemax Saturday at 8 p.m.).