Painfully uninformative

Rating: 3/10 (24 March 2020)

As a biographical film this must represent an unmitigated failure of interpretation and film making execution. With a prodigious runtime and a large budget, respected producers and writers, a very well endowed production scale with a high level of production values, including in the post production work, 'Patton' manages to produce "Pap".
It is primarily for the films technical credits that I rate the film above a terrible 1-2/10 score. As a work of craft this is watchable but as a work of artistic output it is hindered by utterly bland and uncaptivating writing and stodgy direction, overblown acting, overlarge cast, overlarge set pieces and a complete failure to generate a convincing sense of time and place in almost any situation that it depicts.
Karl Malden impressed me in small doses but the rest of the cast seem to be suffering from such a poor level of writing that any actors would be unable to overcome their material here. George C Scott himself, in the leading role as George S Patton, makes a remarkable effort but you can't carry a film if this length and supposed breadth with such pallid and flat material.
Considering the man himself and his exploits and considering the historical context within which this film focuses itself onto his story: the western allies campaigns in Europe in the second half of the Second World War then I can honestly say that a well researched book or documentary will provide a far higher standard of exhilaration, excitement, interest and engagement.
'Patton' to my mind represents an attempt at film making on a subject matter that the film makers in question were unequipped to justify.
I sense that this film is so amazingly uninteresting and uninformative as a piece of artistic output because fundamentally those responsible for it's artistic creation, as opposed to it's technical production, were disinclined to view the subject with anything but dispassionate disinclination.
I rate at 3/10 and I recommend to anyone interested in a meaningless powerhouse acting performance that says nothing of the historical personage being depicted and fans of seeing a lot of military uniforms and hardware on screen. I regret that Scott had to work with the script and the production team that he did; I guess that if his characters writing actually had any guts in it then he could of given an all time great account.