Emmerich displays usual poverty of imagination

Rating: 3/10 (14 August 2000)

There's a moment before the climactic battle at the end of the film where a white soldier turns to the 'token black character' to state what an honour it is to be fighting with him. This is the tip of the anachronistic iceberg which serves to sink The Patriot below the surface of what is acceptable. Not only are we expected to accept that 85 years before the civil war, and 185 years before LBJ's civil rights act, that black Americans could experience emancipation, it also appears that The Patriot can only justify America's stand against the British by suggesting that brutality was the motivation for America's response in the 1770's. Gibson might be holding the American flag in the final battle, but by then it is all sound and fury, signifying nothing. Emmerich fails to transmit a sense of what these men are actually fighting for - instead we have Mel getting angry and getting even...just like in Payback, and Ransom, and Lethal Weapon et al.