i giggled endlessly

Rating: 4/10 (27 March 2004)

i swear, i could not stop laughing throughout this movie. laughing at the characters, the acting, the warped history. i did a little research online and found out a few interesting facts. this film is not historically accurate so i will try and look at it through a movie-based lense, not a historical one.
first of all, though i do enjoy watching mel gibson on occasion, his performance in this film made me cringe. don't get me wrong, he's a wonderful actor but he over did the father-in-anguish, man-with-a-tomented-soul bit and i couldn't muster up enough sympathy for his character on that end. i liked him better than heath ledger, however. okay, so those two charcters are out.
charlotte was fine but she didn't seem to do much more than stand around and react to things. anne was absolutely one of the most obnoxious female i have seen in a flick for the past five years. the children were good and the little girl was delightful, but even those people seemed glossed over. the story checked back on them once or twice but it was incomplete. the militia men were entertaining and the french gentleman was noteworthy at times. but, on the patriot side at least, the characters didn't make too much of an impression.
on the other side (damn those redcoats), evil ole' colonel tavington was engrossing. though the character itself was far too two-dimensional to believe in, mr jason isaacs managed to pull it off. the long flowing hair and the half open frilly shirt was a nice touch, though i wonder what the director was thinking in that scene. seems a little silly to make the man we are supposed to hate look so good.
i liked the costumes (though some were historically inaccurate, but i said i wouldn't delve into that aspect) and the scenery, and the one-on-one fight scenes. i just couldn't find it in my heart to sympathise with the "good-guys" in this film, though i most certainly do not condone the slaughter of helpless civilians. but that was put there for shock value and to make tavington even more unsavory AND none of those characters mattered so it's hard to feel angry about it. the endless amounts of blood sporting from wounds and spraying the faces of the soldiers was a little much.
to wrap this up, i felt nothing more than amusement at the pure silliness of the film. the characters were either annoying or made no impression at at (with the exception of tavington, who was neither), the plot was pulled from some special hollywood handbook somewhere with very little originality and the scenes designed to make us react strongly, failed dismally. as for the historical inaccuracies, all i ahve to say is that i sincerely hope that people do not take this for fact.
so there you have it. a laugh-fest at best.