Not So Great Expectations (SPOILER INCLUDED)

Rating: Null/10 (3 July 2000)

I didn't expect this film to be a classic. But... It's amazing how a good popcorn movie can suck you in. It can make you think it's better than it really is; it can make you remember it as being better than it really was.
"The Patriot" is a popcorn movie. Despite the marketing for the film (epic, historical drama, emotional family tragedy, epic, swell that John Williams score, EPIC), the flick is your standard Mel Gibson actioner. The moral of the story is "Don't Mess With Mel or THERE WILL BE HELL TO PAY!" Despite the first thirty minutes of the film which show Mel living a bucolic family life and trying to live down "the sins" of his past warrior life, this film is really about what happens after Mel stops making rational, pacifist speeches and starts being p***ed on and getting p***ed off.
And there is wonderful power to his meltdown of Biblical proportions. Mel loses his eldest son metaphorically when he enlists in the war. Mel is upset. That son is injured then captured. Mel gets angry. Mel loses his second eldest son when he is killed by the sadistic British officer (is there any other kind in these "realistic" "historical" "epics"?). And (to paraphrase Tom Laughlin in "Billy Jack" [another guy you just should NOT p**s off]), Mel just... goes... berserk! The scene in which Mel uses his two younger sons to ambush the British team escorting his captured son to execution, where the sons (nine and eleven years of age) "aim for the officers" first, where Mel kills off the British team and hacks the final Brit to death with his Cherokee tomahawk, and continues to hack him after death to the horrified stares of his three sons, is a scene of uncommon brutality, of uncommon power. It is a keeper.
And this power continues for most of the picture. Sure, Hollywood creeps in at moments: ridiculous dialogue, anachronistic behavior (the open-mouthed kiss between the son Gabriel and his soon-to-be-betrothed surely would never have happened), the seemingly obligatory "good" slave fighting for REAL freedom plot-line, and that swelling Williams score. But the power of Gibson's performance, the strength and emotional tug of the plot line (especially for this father, the son of a warrior, sitting in a theater on Fourth of July weekend) had me going. It had me thinking the film was better than it was.
** SPOILER ALERT ** And then IT happened. And I'm going to state was IT is (so if you don't want to know what happens in the flick, skip to the end of the review)...
Mel's son Gabriel kills the sadistic brutal British bad guy (and for a moment, as Hollywood convention is broken, the film's greatness was solidified), but he didn't really... just as he was about to hack the body of his newlywed bride's killer (like father, like son), the baddie turns around and skewers the kid, and runs off to FIGHT ANOTHER DAY, setting up the Hollywood climactic fight with Mad Mel. And the film began to lose me. Then the final battle is not set up at all. We know that a battle is about to happen, and we're told that the strategy the revolutionaries are going to employ will be not what Cornwallis expects, but that's it. We're not told how it will break contemporary battlefield convention. Without this knowledge, the battle sequence is unwatchable, completely without intellectual OR emotional impact (This is where the otherwise Hollywood-soppy "Titanic" was masterful: we know exactly what is going to happen to the ship before it happens... so when it does happen, there is a heightened sense of tragedy and inevitability). This final battle scene is so ineptly shot and cut that the film loses intellectual direction and emotional suspense.
And then, THEN to Williams' self-cannibalized strains of pseudo-Indy-esque adventure music, Mel must take on the bad guy in HAND to HAND combat. And here Mel should die, decapitated by the sadistic brutal British bad guy, with visions of sunlight streaming around and through the fluttering colonial flag, knowing that his strategy has won the day for the Americans, for the cause of his son. The sword comes around, and Hollywood, er, Mel ducks down and skewers the sadistic brutal British bad guy, commenting to him that his own sons (yep, the two that the sadistic brutal British bad guy killed) were better men. Swell music.
Then we get an COMPLETELY inept wrap-up of the war. A character whose wife is expecting a child before the climactic battle, finally gives birth to the child THREE YEARS LATER. Mel marries (I think) his wife's sister, and she carries his baby in her arm (or does she?). And Mel's Men (including the now free former-slave) build him a home. Sell music.
Suddenly, twenty minutes after thinking this was a great movie, I wasn't so sure it was even a good movie.
It makes one think.
Much has been made of the R-rated violence in the film. And I think it is indicative of the Hollywood Problem and a pretty good discussion point in a comparison to a better (if not truly great) film like "Saving Private Ryan" (written by the same writer, Robert Rodat, and sharing some of that film's emotionally manipulative shortcomings). Whereas in "Ryan" the truly gruesome visions (entrails outside the body, limbs missing) were seen in a scene's periphery and the shot's focus was on a character about whom we cared, the grotesquerie in "The Patriot" ARE the focus of the scene. Hollywood's hand can be seen in this sideshow-like fascination and dumbing-down to the lowest common audience; an audience member in the row behind me actually laughed at the cannonball decapitation.
We get the movies we deserve (or at least the ones we'll go and see). They may not be great ones or even good ones, but they will be ones that live down to our expectations.