Patriot (Mel Gibson)

The Patriot Review

Yes, there was the megaflop 'Revolution' and a dire Seventies musical called '1776', but the surprise is quite how it took this long for Hollywood to make a big, loud summer blockbuster action-epic about the American War of Independence. When you think about it, defending your home on actual American soil and fighting for the cause of liberty is about as much motivation as you need to crack a few skulls and drape yourself in the stars and stripes. Indeed, the whole package looks like some studio's wet dream: you've Mel Gibson getting mad against the English again in juicy 'Braveheart' style; there's 'the new Mel Gibson' in Antipodean smoulderer Heath Ledger, doing the broody son and picking up all the youth-market coverage; plus director Roland Emmerich 'on board hoping to recapture the gung-ho audience appeal which made 'Independence Day' a mint. Oh, and not forgetting the screenplay from Robert Rodat of 'Saving Private Ryan' note, which at least gives the initial appearance this this might be your thinking-person's big, loud summer blockbuster action-epic.

Well, to be fair, thought does come into it, but only up to the point where it starts challenging the audience. In its favour, 'The Patriot' is very effective at showing what's at stake when an enemy army take their campaign right into your back garden. Gibson plays a battle-weary Carolina veteran of the French and Indian wars who at first wants no more of the independence cause, but when the redcoats burn his farm and murder one of his sons, it somewhat alters his convictions. In the early stages, the film makes motions towards pondering the legitimacy of the often extreme measures Gibson deploys to take the fight back to the English. One shocking sequence shows him supported by his rifle-toting small sons, as he cuts a patrol down with a hatchet and loses himself in the blood-letting. And not for the first time either, we later learn, for there are other such dark moments in his past.

Gibson is very persuasive throughout, drawing a persuasive picture of a loving father only too ready to go over the edge once he's pushed too far. He's so good in fact that you end up wishing the movie didn't wimp out quite so much. But it does. Having brought up this troubling idea, the movie swiftly remembers it's a Roland Emmerich picture, and falls back on cliched villainry, standard movie heroics and Mel appearing to win the war virtually single-handedly.

The capitulation is pretty much the same when it comes to the handling of the British forces. We start out with there being some conflict between Tom Wilkinson's gentlemanly General Cornwallis and the ruthlessly vicious captain (Jason Isaacs) on whom Gibson has sworn revenge. Having paid lip-service to this debate however, it disappointingly falls back on cartoon do-baddery to lumpenly obvious effect.

With the budget to do justice to the absurd horror of eighteenth-century warfare (long lines of soldiers shooting each other at close range...duuhh!), 'The Patriot' certainly delivers on the action front. Ultimately it doesn't stand up to very much more scrutiny than that, especially when pandering to current Political Correctness by trying to pretend that freedom for the slaves was part of the prize the American rebels were fighting for. That would obviously come much later, and for the movie to try to pretend otherwise verges on the patronising. A pity really, since this might have been quite something if it hadn't suffered a serious attack of the stupids.