A good movie in need of some editing.

Rating: Null/10 (12 July 2000)

First off let me say that I liked The Patriot, and I think it's worth seeing -- especially given that there are so few movies set during the American Revolution, and this movie's acting and production values are good.
It's not a history lesson. It doesn't purport to be a dramatization of actual historical events or the lives of historical personages though the inspiration for its plot can certainly be found among historical events. The only historical figure we see in the movie is a briefly glimpsed George Washington. He doesn't speak and is seen from afar.
The story centers around one Benjamin Martin, played by Mel Gibson. He's a Carolina plantation owner, widower, and hero of the French and Indian War. The movie opens with Martin putting his souvenirs of that war, including an engraved tomahawk, into a trunk and cryptically stating that he fears his sins will come back to haunt him. Those sins turn about to be organizing an atrocity against the French and their Indian allies. His role in that event is known to almost everyone except his children, and the memories of war keep him from taking up arms against the British though he thinks the colonies should be independent. His duty, he maintains, is to protect his family.
But a son's willful enlistment in the Continental Army and the brutal actions of the decidedly ungentlemanly Tavington, an officer in the British Dragoons (his character is based on an actual officer nicknamed "Bloody" Tarleton just as Martin bears more than a passing resemblance to Francis Marion aka "The Swamp Fox" -- subject of a Disney movie of the same name) violently transforms Martin from a sullen neutral into the sort of violent avenger familiar from many of Gibson's other movie characters (see Hamlet, Riggs, Porter, and Mad Max) and, eventually, into a true patriot.
I didn't mind this character arc, expected as it was. Dramatically it works, and, historically, the brutality and military and diplomatic incompetence of the British did push many a person off the fence during the Revolution and into the arms of the rebellion.
There are other things to like in this movie. Historically, it does a good job in showing that not all the Colonials were pleased to have the French as allies, particularly the older soldiers who fought against them in the sometimes brutal French and Indian War. The Carolina theater, with its savage guerilla warfare, a civil war where colonist turned on colonist, sometimes for political ends, sometimes to settle personal grudges, is well depicted. And the movie shows a wide variety of Loyalist, British, and Colonials. No side is universally brutal in the war.
But the latter is part of the movie's problem too. This movie has too much going on, would have been served by another edit. Screenwriter Robert Rodat wrote the excellent Saving Private Ryan. Here, though, free from dramatizing events set against a quite specific historical event, his focus drifts. At times, he seemed to be trying to write two movies. One is about the American Revolution and its ideals. The other is darker and about the practical and moral dilemma of whether leniency or brutality is the best way to bring a guerilla foe to heel. The latter is the more fascinating movie, but it often overshadows the story of the Revolution. Indeed, this plot of atrocity and reprisal could have been set in many time periods (including Missouri during the Civil War).
The movie also is weighed down by two romantic subplots. One is a palatable, subtle romance between Gibson and the sister of his dead wife. The other is an intrusive romance between Martin's son and a woman whose main purpose is to satisfy the dramatic dictum that the innocent must suffer.
The movie also suffers from a lot of movie cliches: enemies who conveniently go down with one shot except, of course, the villain; many a coincidence; and dramatic entrances at darkest hours as well as some literal flagwaving (though, in the movie's defense, flagbearers at this time were important to not only the morale of the military but also to its tactical deployment and would remain so at least through the Civil War). Roland Emmerich, never a particularly subtle director (Exhibit One: his Independence Day), delights in sentimental tokens in a way that would warm the heart of a Victorian melodramatist. Besides the nascent American flag, he drags out lead soldiers and silver necklaces and uses them not once, not twice, but several times as touchstones of poignancy.
I call them cliches. But maybe these are what other people meant when they referred to the film as "old fashioned moviemaking." However, the film's overuse of slow motion was certainly not old fashioned.
Historically, I was slightly bothered by the rather unbelievable congeniality that slaves and freedman showed towards Martin, a slaveholder, and his family. (Though the movie does accurately show blacks fighting for both sides.) The flintlock handguns used in the movie also seem to have unbelievable range, accuracy, and lethality.
Michael Mann's The Last of the Mohicans depicts the warfare of the period in a more exciting way. Gettysburg and, of course, Waterloo do a better job showing the terror and tactics of Napoleonic style warfare though this may be the first movie to try and accurately depict the effects of cannonballs on massed formations as we see some decapitations and general maimings.
So why do I recommend this movie? Because, beneath the sentimental excess and dramatic cliches, there is an interesting story of brutal warfare on American soil, and Gibson, in two or three scenes, is allowed to show a genuinely dark character who (rather like Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven) has been reformed by the love of a now dead woman and finds his violent nature again brought to the fore. And it troubles him and his family.