I remember when it first came out, my reaction was, "In this day and age there is too much temptation for writers, distributors, studios and so forth to take too many liberties with history on something like the Free State of Jones to push modern agendas, it won't be worth watching." which I didn't, and when I heard it was a flop my mentality was a sarcastic "Gee I wonder why?" and I moved on.
Several months back it was about to come on the TV and I decided to watch it. My first reaction in the first 15 minutes was "Whoever designed this CW battle, and the camps and so on knows absolutely nothing about what any of them looked like!" and when the movie moved to Jones County and the big evil Confederate officer in charge was revealed with his troops my thoughts were "Were the costumers a bunch of monkeys!?" I mean seriously that character's so-called "Confederate" uniform is a costume from wally world! (I'm using that term loosely, it is a cheap ten dollar costume though, and these remarks are coming from someone who has headed that department up on films), and so many background details were horribly off. I've worked on budget flicks that didn't have a fraction of the budget and were horrible in prop and background details and still did a better job than "Free State of Jones"!
As for the story, it was okay but too many liberties with history to appeal to me, and sacrificing history to play modern politics. The acting, it was top shelf mostly with some details being a bit out there, acting and story wise. It has its moments though I'll admit, with more than a few scenes being great enough to sweep even my nitpicky self up into it.
As a normal movie, I'd say its okay and a good watch every now and then when it comes on TV and there is nothing else on, but never something to search out on DVD or streaming platforms. As a CW movie, I say avoid this thing like the plague, utterly horrible, doing justice to neither side of the war or even its characters, and doing injustice to all sides.
When I finally saw it, I thought "You know I need to put my preconceived notions aside and give it a chance." which I did, and came away with more disappointed than I would've if I had stuck to my notions and not watched it. But this is all me, and I'm a big nitpicker on historical period films, and I say everyone who interested in CW films should watch it, some may like it. After all my tastes are different from everyone else's.