Those English are awful people. Let's kill 'em.

Rating: Null/10 (5 June 2001)

(That was sarcasm.)
Hollywood's general portrayal of the English is puzzling. (Not being English myself, I make this comment as a neutral and detached observer.)
First, you have your garden-variety romantic comedy. An English person in a typical romantic comedy is a moderately cute blond guy dressed in unprepossessing catalogue attire and touting an exaggerated British accent, which passes with the general public not only as a sign, but as the very essence, of sophistication. Indeed, what a hottie a British man is: foreign enough to be exotic, but not too much so; just enough accent to make English sound like a foreign language; and yet, you don't have to learn a language to communicate with him -- which, given the Americans' overwhelming aversion to foreign tongues, is of utmost importance.
Then you have the other genres, in which the English characters range from sterile and repressed to downright demonically villainous. THE PATRIOT adheres to the latter stereotype. I cannot begin imagine how offensive this movie is to the English viewer.
And what of history? The American revolution was the revolution of the intellectuals; it was over taxes, fine points of political participation, the meaning of citizenship -- it was not prompted by acts of extreme terror and genocide, as the movie seems to suggest. There was violence to be sure, but it occurred on both sides, and it was neither the long-term cause nor the trigger for the American Revolution. And let us not forget those colonists who were severely punished by expropriation of their property, banishment, imprisonment, and execution merely for refusing to renounce their allegeance to their original sovereign.
Of course, the sophistication of the revolution's causes does not mean that the colonists were unjustified in rebelling. But the Americans are forever plagued by a nostalgia for a story of woe more compelling than that saga of resentment over the stupid stamp taxes. We envy older nations their titanic struggles, their big chunks of suffering. WE did not have a Hitler. WE did not have to struggle for our very survival as a people and a culture (yet). For all that lofty verbiage in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, the grievances that follow it seem boring and petty.
To that extent, THE PATRIOT is a miserable cry of that nostalgia rather than a conscious indictment of the English. Though I doubt that would make the English viewers feel better.