strong theme, ruined by clunky Hollywood sentimentality

Rating: 4/10 (22 February 2001)

This film has a strong central theme, and is beautifully shot, but its plot and dialogue are hopelessly cluttered with Hollywood focus-group nonsense. Contemporary sensibilities about single parenthood, racial equality, sexual equality, and anti-war sentiment (war and killing are unambiguously evil) do considerable violence to the delightful fiction that we are witnessing events of more than 200 years ago. As if this weren't damaging enough, the film's director appears to have lifted important images and action sequences directly from Michael Mann's 1992 adaptation of James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans. The only important differences are that in The Patriot, Gibson's action sequences seem clunky and oafish as compared to Day Lewis's in Last of the Mohicans. Overall what should be a strength of the film turns out to be a major disappointment. Finally, the film is burdened by a mannered style which insists on lingering on Mel Gibson's pain and grief: Mr. Gibson is an actor more than capable of communicating powerful emotions on the screen, but here his direction forces us to witness something akin to an interminable series of acting workshop performances. And the pain and grief are excessive in relation to the demands of the plot, which is essentially a B-movie Kung Fu plot: (1) retired hero commits to non-violence and tends his garden, (2) evil man kills his friend, family member, and/or master, and (3) provokes non-violent hero to abandon pacifism in favor of righteous violence, (4) the two confront each other, and (4a) the hero at first suffers defeat, but then (4b) rallies and kills evil man in spectacular and poetic manner. Here we have an already motivated hero (patriotism, death of family member) unnecessarily remotivated, and an evil man killed twice. Add to this an opaque sub-plot about a little girl who is voluntarily mute and you get a stone around the neck of this film that all but sinks it. Ridiculous.