Very enjoyable Hollywood blockbuster.

Rating: 8/10 (10 August 2000)

Benjamin Martin(Mel Gibson) has a dark, shady past which he dearly wants to forget. Being a widower with seven children to care for helps him to do that very thing, but when his son Gabriel(Heath Ledger) signs up for the army to battle the Brits in the American Revolution, it's not long before events go awry, resulting in a family tragedy...
When Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich(producer and director respectively of such films as Independence Day) decided to do this film, they set out to make it a "really beautiful movie". If asked whether they had succeeded, the answer would be a semi-yes. It's not that this film isn't great, it is, it's just that what we have here is a Hollywood blockbuster beefed up with a decent plot and some good character development.
You won't be surprised when Mel turns in a performance that's as charismatic and captivating as ever. The treat here is Heath Ledger's star turn as Gabriel. Ledger hasn't "ditched the accent" as promised, but that doesn't matter, because here he has made his character someone you really care about. In "10 Things I Hate About You", he seemed promising, and now, in The Patriot, he dislays his full potential.
There's ample CGI usage on show here, a real standout being the fabulous recreations of whole towns. Of course, the entertaining battles are also effects-heavy and there's an amazing sequence where an in-motion cannonball takes up the whole screen for a split second and then proceeds to remove an unfortunate soldier's head. Exhilirating stuff, and guaranteed to make the audience jump.
It's no wonder that Spike Lee was getting all hot under the collar about the movie's script turning a blind eye to the treatment of blacks during this period in history. It was the 1700s, after all, so it's no mere historical inaccuracy to have American Southereners(!) talking about racial equality. It's just plain unrealistic Hollywood nonsense, and badly affects the film's believability.
The Brits are made out here to be real meanies, committing atrocities within the film that didn't even happen in the real war. Thankfully, this works for the film, because it's refreshing to have a baddie that you really hate(Jason Isaacs in a cold-blooded performance) instead of someone pathetically weak like Joaquin Phoenix's Commodus.
The final thing to be said about this film is that it has a richly sentimental feel to it. Mercifully, the emotional scenes never reach mawkish heights, but there's still a fair bit of heart string pulling about. That said, Emmerich compensates for the sentimentality by throwing in a good number of moments chock-a-block with gore, which is fair enough.
Rating:4 out of 5