Braveheart comes to America

Rating: 9/10 (1 July 2000)

Good action, good story, good and gory special effects in the battle scenes. It always seemed to me that having men dressed in brightly colored coats with an "X" over the center of their chest, firing muskets at each other while standing at point blank range, was a dumb and inhumane way of fighting a war. This movie proves conclusively that the carnage was just as grisly during the Revolution as it was on the beaches of Normandy, man's inhumanity to man just as debased two hundred years ago as it was in the infamous twentieth century. Or maybe it just proves that the technology of war always leads to terrible suffering among the innocent who stand in the way. Some things seemed overstated, however: we know that in France the Nazis locked all the old men, women and children in a town inside the church and burned it with full loss of life, and it stands as a monuments today; but do we know that this was done by the Redcoats during the Revolution? Certainly, it's a first for me, and if untrue a gratuitous insult. Mel Gibson was fine, but maybe after twenty years or so he should try a different film personna. Even Sean Connery got too old for James Bond, after all.