This IS NOT an American movie!!!

Rating: 2/10 (6 August 2007)

Foreign readers: Don't blame America for this movie! It's got a German director and an Australian star - Gibson. And Gibson has a track record of anti-British movies.
Most Americans know this movie is not accurate. It's sad that some foreigners might form opinions based on this vile, hate-mongering manure.
To watch this movie is to learn what it feels like to be covered head to toe with sweet smelling vomit.
The British soldiers are portrayed as 18th century versions of Nazi Storm Troopers, and Jason Isaacs playing a fictional Col. William Tavington as an unbridled sadist who kills, burns and pillages just for the fun of it.
The high point of the movie, so to speak, is when Tavington locks the townspeople in a church -- after they tell him what he wants, ratting out a fellow patriot -- and burns the entire town, women, children, men, boys, to death.
I know something about the history of the Revolution, and had never heard of this. Apparently, it is based on a Nazi war crime, not anything done by the British. The movie is directed by a German, Roland Emmerich, which perhaps tells us something.
The movie seems to follow the Mel Gibson formula of ultra good guys vs ultra bad guys (usually the British) with lots of graphic blood and guts violence. It would be technically interesting to count how many times we must witness a musket ball hitting a body and blood spurting out, for someone with a strong stomach. Is there a point here?
The acting in the movie, overall, is nothing special, but Gibson's performance is by far the worst. Witnessing this travesty by Gibson kept bringing to mind the parodies of silent picture acting from "Singing in the Rain." People all around him are dying, yet the best Gibson can summon up in the emotions department is empty, over-blown gesturing. This might have qualified as acting in the 1920s, but not today.
Mel Gibson could act, once. He did it in The Year of Living Dangerously. But now apparently it is too much work for him, despite the $25 million they paid him for this performance.
I don't mind a good old fashioned movie with heroes and villains, and I'm sure there were heroes and villains on both sides of the Revolution. But this movie doesn't find them. All it finds are caricatures of heroes and villains.