I Had Such High Expectations...

Rating: Null/10 (4 July 2000)

Maybe I shouldn't have. (CONTAINS SPOILERS) One can't expect every supposed epic to be one; after all, Kevin Costner did "Dances with Wolves" and then "Waterworld." But I did hope for better from Mel Gibson, who had been pretty darned good in "Braveheart." Maybe he should've directed this one, too...no, I don't think that would have helped much. It was the writing that was most at fault.
I studied about Francis Marion when I was a kid living in South Carolina, and as I knew the movie was based (however loosely) on him I had hopes in that direction too. Unfortunately I think the only thing they had in common was a residency in the state of S.C. and the last names sounded vaguely similar.
Mel Gibson has made most of his living from playing reluctant heroes, and like his character in Braveheart, this guy only wanted to raise crops and a family; like Braveheart, circumstances brought him into the war. There were other things stolen from Braveheart, too...the guys running away and leading the soldiers into a trap; stealing the uniforms and using them to fool the bad guys, etc. Of course the movie doesn't just steal from Braveheart -- I was shocked to see "the Highlander" so patently ripped off. One of Duncan MacLeod's favorite tactics is to kneel, facing away from the bad guy, and then swing around with his sword just as the bad guy steps up for the coup-de-grace. The climactical riding up with the flag looked like a cross between "Gettysburg" and "Dances with Wolves."
The movie wasn't all bad. I liked some of the minor characters, such as the preacher (played ably by Rene Auberjonois, ST:DS9's "Odo") who left his church in mid-sermon to join the militia. I just didn't like the politically correct "give the girls something to do" speech made by the teenaged girl that shamed him into it. I liked the slave who fought for his own freedom, and everyone else's -- but I didn't like the inaccuracy of having most of the blacks in the movie portrayed as freedmen working on the plantations because they earned a good living doing it...let's get real...if they'd all been freedmen, for Pete's sake, there wouldn't have been another war less than 100 years later.
But the things I didn't like outweighed the things I did. One of the things I really hated was having telegraphed punches -- for example, the boy's wedding is so darned happy that one knows quite well something really bad is going to happen. The bad guy is such a shallow, boo-hiss sort of fellow that as soon as you meet him you know he's going to die slowly and horribly at the hands of the hero. And the hero himself, a fellow with a "past" that tortures him, is a mystery to his son -- who must be brain dead not to grasp the situation after he sees his father become a raging berserker the first time. I wouldn't have wanted an explanation of the tortured past after seeing that. And good heavens, in a more modern time Benjamin Martin would've spent a fortune in counseling for the two little boys (pre-teens) who participated in the oldest son's rescue, the scene which shows what kind of character Martin is capable of being.
There's another thing...the clothing, customs (well, some...though why provide a bundling bag and then allow french kissing is beyond me...) are scrupulously recreated but the dialogue is so modern I kept expecting the people to burst into "wow, that was weird" or something. It's as if the movie didn't know what it wanted to be. It didn't want to be an epic, just a really long movie. It wasn't like "Shenandoah," about a fellow trying to hold his family together in the face of war, though there were elements of it (too many family elements to be easily kept track of for that matter: the one son acted like he'd be damaged for life but was miraculously normal by the end of the movie; the little girl hated her father and withdrew from his touch and then, with no clue of why she changed her mind --or why she hated him in the first place-- she loved him).
It got confusing -- too many fingers in too many pies. It wasn't an action movie, or a war movie, or a soap, though it had lots of action, war, and lots of soapiness ("I'm not my sister!") a really patriotic movie; even "Independence Day" had more patriotism than this one. In the motorcycle business there are things called "parts-bins bikes," which are bikes built out of leftover pieces. Some work great (the Yamaha Radian) and some don't work at all. "The Patriot" is a parts-bin movie, and it just doesn't work.
For all one would think the American Revolution would provide a wonderful subject (or even a backdrop) for any movie, the definitive Revolution epic has yet to be made. It's funny that "1776" is still the best movie about the Revolution, because that's the movie no one would want to take seriously. But its drama is more convincing, language more realistic, and characters more deep and their motivations more understandable -- even in spite of the singing and dancing -- than "the Patriot" ever could be.