A just plain lousy film

Rating: 2/10 (5 July 2000)

(Minor spoilers)
Disappointing and awful. I can't remember the last time I saw a story so trite and cliche. Braveheart transplanted to a different time and place, only without all of the stuff which made Braveheart great.
Mel Gibson plays Benjamin Martin, a hero of the French and Indian War who's now a pacifist living in South Carolina. It's 1776 and the War for Independence is underway. The barbaric British kill Gibson's wife (oops - that's Braveheart - I mean his son), p***ing him off into a crazy-angry vengeance, so he massacres the English garrison at the stockade (oops - that's Braveheart - I mean the British patrol marching along a road) then rounds up all of his highlander buddies (oops - that's Braveheart - I mean all of his colonist buddies) to wage a clever, outwit-the-uppity British campaign.
And the Braveheart rip-offs don't even begin to tell why this film sucks so badly. It's just a display of second-rate (and third-rate) writing, storytelling, acting, and dialog. Even Mel Gibson is just a two-dimensional walk-through for most of the film - he only has two or three scenes where he does any real acting. The only decent acting in The Patriot is done by Heath Ledger as one of Martin's sons. And ALL of the roles are caricatures and stereotypes.
Without ruining any surprises, here are a couple of examples from the film of just why it is so bad in specific areas -
Dialog: "May I sit with you?" "It's a free country. At least, it soon will be."
Plot contrivance: Could we guess that the black slave, fighting for the rebellion so that he can earn his freedom, would risk his life in a "dramatic" moment in battle to rescue the mean white guy who's been deriding and belittling him throughout the film?
Stupid, over-the-top idiocy: Geez, there's too much to choose from here - I can't pick just one example.
It gets worse. Jason Isaacs plays evil British Colonel William Tavington. His ridiculous, two-dimensional part is so badly conceived, so heavy-handed and so unremittingly stupid that it sends the film out of the realm of historical drama and into the world of cartoonish idiocy. He's obviously based on real-life British dragoon officer Banastre Tarleton, who commanded a legion in the south and committed some atrocities (he massacred a bunch of prisoners after a battle), but is taken to silly extremes just to make us hate those bad-guy British and salivate for the inevitable, one-on-one man-to-man showdown between Mel and the Evil British Officer as a pitched battle rages around them.
Gibson's character is also an obvious rip-off of real-life "Swamp Fox" Francis Marion, whose real-life exploits make all of this high Hollywood drama look terribly lightweight by comparison.
The best effects and prettiest views in the film are the couple of brief shots of ships - some in Charleston harbor, a British supply ship at anchor, and VERY impressive shots of the French fleet off Yorktown. Those had to be CGI and/or miniatures - I can't imagine there are that many square-rigged warships in the world today - but holy cow, they looked completely REAL, even when firing their guns.
The battle scenes have a few good elements. It is impossible not to be impressed when viewing rank after rank of period-attired and accoutred soldiers advancing across the field, presenting their muskets, and firing a volley. The cannon effects are pretty nice. But the battles overall are lousy - very poor overuse of slow-motion, making the scenes look silly. There's also much use of whatever that annoying digital effect was which was used in some of the fighting closeups in Gladiator. It looks bad, and it's distracting.
Now, for the choreography of the individual fighting stuff - it's worse than you see in a terrible no-budget TV show. REALLY poor. Jerky, badly-rehearsed and executed, with lots of the supposedly fatal blows obviously and clearly missing their supposed targets by a good foot. Very Three Stooges, only Stooge violence looks much more believable and realistic.
Pukey, pretentious score by John Williams, but since those are the only kind he does these days, it comes as no surprise.
I expected a lot from this film, based on the actors/writers/directors involved, but it is just a really crappy movie from start to finish.
Awful, awful, awful. 2 of 10.