Not every movie that boasts that it was based on or inspired by true events accurately portrays the real people involved. Today we invited the team to vent about historical figures who were done dirty by a cinematic release.

Sitting Duck: James Wilson in 1776. It just so happened that Wilson had studied law under his fellow Pennsylvania delegate and the film’s primary antagonist John Dickenson. From this, writer Peter Stone presented him as Dickenson’s milquetoast punching bag who desperately just wants to be noticed. Only when the spotlight finally lands on him, he finds he doesn’t like it and votes for independence in hopes that he’ll blend in with the crowd and be forgotten about by history. To make sure the audience knows what a pathetic loser he is, this 33-year-old statesman is portrayed by a balding, pudgy 47-year-old actor.

This is a gross insult, as Wilson had always been a prominent supporter of independence. He was merely confronted with the dilemma assigned to Lyman Hall, in that he personally supported independence, but represented a constituency that wasn’t sold on the idea. However, thanks to the Continental Congress being held in Philadelphia, he was able to convince his fellow Pennsylvanians that it was the best course of action. He was also one of the first Supreme Court justices, so that’s not exactly the picture of a guy trying to evade the historical spotlight.

Drake: So if you’ve ever seen Argo, then you’ve seen Ben Affleck single-handedly swoop into Iran to save six Americans from being held as hostages and jet them to safety as the Keystone Kops double for the Iranian military in an inept attempt to stop them. While there are kernels of truth in the movie, there’s also a lot of [CENSORED]. Oops. Sorry, Justin. I meant cow manure. My bad.

One of the real liberties taken was in the portrayal of Canadian Ambassador Ken Taylor, who was instrumental in the plan to get the six Americans out of Iran. Taylor was the one who was in contact with Washington, D.C. and who set the plan in motion, and it was he and his people who housed the Americans, scouted the airports, obtained the necessary paperwork and airline tickets for them and even coached the six on faking Canadian accents. In short, Taylor & company were doing all of the actual on-the-ground spy work while Affleck was getting his beard trimmed and his hair feathered.

So this July 1st be sure to crack open a bottle of Moosehead Lager while blasting some Aldo Nova (or Rush) and salute our neighbors to the North, with a special note of appreciation for Ken Taylor. And also Canadian embassy employee John Sheardown, who was written out of the movie entirely. You guys are the best, eh?

Justin: As a pastor and Bible scholar, I’m going to go with Moses in The Prince of Egypt. It’s an amazing movie that gets right more than it gets wrong, biblically speaking, but the character of Moses has a weird divergence from the Biblical Moses — and I’m not only talking about how he should be an 80-year-old guy around the time of the Exodus.

The problem is that the filmmakers decided on focusing on the relationship between the Pharaoh and Moses as adopted half-brothers. Dramatically, this is strong, and it makes for some great tension. Yet the movie portrays Moses as in anguish that he has to break with family to follow God’s commands. Heck, he even whines about it during a song, saying, “And even now I wish that God had chose another, serving as your foe on his behalf is the last thing that I wanted.” Ooh that line grates, because he comes across as a very reluctant leader very reluctantly obeying against his wishes. That is not Moses from Exodus.

Moses from scripture broke with the Egyptians after seeing their brutality against the Hebrews, identifying with his people in the process. Yes, he is initially reluctant to accept God’s call to lead, but it’s more from fear and inadequacy than having to face off against his (adoptive) brother. When Moses goes to Pharaoh, he comes as a prophet of God who is in sync with the will of God in this situation to demand that the people be set free to worship. There’s none of this brother-angst going on.

Anthony: It may be hard to understand if you’re not part of my culture, but being a French Canadian in the first half of the 20th century was absolutely not a walk in the park. In our own province we were nothing more than second-class citizens, condemned to meagre education and dead-end jobs that took away the best years of your life and made you geriatric by the time you hit 40.

And it was oodles worse when we were outside said province. In the early 20th century, a large percentage of the Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire populations were French Speakers, but by the mid-1920s the Klan took hold of power seats in these parts and quickly made the language downright illegal to speak, driving the French population to flee back to Canada. So imagine what happened when, among a domain run by American and English-Canadian wealth, the most talented asset happens to be a dirt-poor, uneducated, not very handsome Frenchie from the suburbs of Montreal.

Known to us as The Rocket, Maurice Richard punched out of his steel mill job one afternoon to go to the open try-outs for the Montreal Canadians, one of the original and powerful Hockey teams of the NHL. He came out with a short-term contract but given very little chance to prove himself, made even worse by constant injuries. And yet within three seasons he was the best g*damn hockey player of the western world. Yet because he was a Frenchie, he was paid peanuts, had to keep his day job, was constantly attack by goons who could barely skate, and even ended up suspended during a crucial time of the season because he fought back against a referee who was literally holding him while a goon was punching the bejeezus out of him.

No matter how hard the owners banded together to prevent him from getting the appropriate trophies and acclaims he deserved, he was still the first — the first — NHL player to score 50 goals in 50 games, which is something they could not sweep under the rug. Richard has yet to receive an apology, even if posthumous, for being treated like garbage simply because of his cultural provenance.

So I was really, really happy that a really really good movie was made about his life, but my huge beef with with the 2005 movie The Rocket is that the dude was portrayed by the Canadian bastard child of Christopher Reeves and a Greek Goddess, the impossibly handsome and magnetic Roy Dupuis.

Roy made it all look EASY. He’s tall, lean, makes Brad Pitt look like a cartoon character, and speaks in hush dulcets that have melted many a pair of panties. Richard himself was closer in appearance and behavior to the comics version of Wolverine, with the face of a piano dropped from the 5th floor. He had to work friggin’ hard to achieve the game-level he was at, but this thespian makes it look like he was simply touched by the grace of God and that the constant harassment and abuse flowed off his back. The dude was paid so little he had to keep his day job throughout his career and kept working like a mule to earn his wage even after retirement from hockey. None of that shows in the face of Mr. Square Jaw from Hollywood North.

I love the movie, I truly do, because they made it accessible to English-speaking population in order for them, for YOU, to learn who we are as a culture and a nation. But Maurice Richard deserved to have his true colors shown, his true journey detailed, his true hardships, and his achievements celebrated. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to have the most handsome man on the planet play ME in a movie, I’d be friggin’ honored, but I’m nobody, and certainly not someone whose life had such a tremendous impact on his people, his country, on the entire sporting industry. Don’t sugar coat how he was and what he went through — shove that shit on the screen for all to see.