It could've been so beautiful

Rating: 2/10 (18 June 2009)

I broke a vow recently that I had made that I would never watch The Patriot, but curiosity got the better of me and I watched it. First glance told me that this was an awful film that was borderline "Birth of a Nation" that would've made the KKK blush! Sometimes, it got so bad that I laughed my head off at it! Second time round, it didn't seem quite as bad, but still not great.
There are 3 main problems with this film.
1. Slavery is brushed over very tidily, something that Spike Lee was enraged about. In an early scene, Jason Isaac's character Colonel William Tavington offers freedom to all slaves who join the British army, to which the (entirely) black workers reply that they're "not slaves" before he simply press-gangs them into service. The Native Americans too, rarely get a mention. It is likely that it is because of the fact that though a few did fight with the colonists, the majority fought alongside the British because they felt that the emergence of the United States would result in them being ousted from their lands, and this would look embarrassing on film. Speaking of embarrassing, one of the worst parts of the film was the Caribbean-style village with the happy and contented black workers. I mean, we are in 18th Century America, aren't we? Not 21st Century Barbados!
2. My main problem (predictably), the British are portrayed as ridiculously O.T.T 18th Century Nazis. Granted, the British Empire wasn't always that nice with plenty of atrocities to boot, but neither side was worse than the other during the revolutionary war. However, here the British redcoats shoot wounded soldiers, burn down houses, kill people even to the point of barring them in a church and burning it, which is disturbing considering that the (German) director is copying atrocities that the SS committed in WWII (the church one matching the 1944 Oradour-Sur-Glane massacre) while making people believe we British actually did this in the war. To copy real atrocities to make ones that never happened in this war is not just unfair on us Brits, but on those who died in the real massacre. On a personal note, I do not mind if its about actual atrocities committed by our country, but making up false ones while making the revolutionaries as nauseatingly perfect is borderline nationalism that would embarrass the KKK! I don't really mind us being the bad guys. Sometimes it gets annoying, sometimes it's quite refreshing, but I counted the British atrocities in this film, and there were 10 of them. Considering that the Americans weren't as innocent as they were shown in the film makes it rather hypocritical of the makers. I mean, we don't need everyone to hate us on a false premise!
3. Some of the lines uttered by the likes of Tavington such as "stupid boy" are rather embarrassing, the sort of thing I'd expect from a villain twirling a long moustache with a top hat. The love interest was awful and completely uninteresting. The bit with Gabriel and the tea with ink in it wasn't a highlight, though the bit where the British general's dogs are taken by Benjamin was fairly amusing. Some of the special effects looked nice, but others were downright awful, with of cannonballs literally whipping people's legs and heads off, and the use of slow motion ruining some otherwise very good fight sequences.
The film's only saving graces were the cast (mostly). Gibson is a fine actor on screen (and certainly not an Anglophobe), most of the cast are very good, though often a tad sentimental. The other is the battle at the end, which at last, throws away all the Anglophobic propaganda with both sides fighting without any frills for once, with the exception of the showdown with Tavington. The other real saving grace is the beautiful settings, of the swamps, open fields, and forests, of South Carolina.