I found this movie...

Rating: Null/10 (15 July 2000)

...mawkish. And embarrassing. It wasn't the historical inaccuracies (_Elizabeth_ was historically inaccurate but ever so much more elegant and compelling); it was the Hollywood sentimentality of this movie and its predictably violent outcome that got to me. I mean really. Goring Tavington's horse with the tip of the American flag. You knew that was coming ten miles away. And that utterly gratuitous bloodbath at the end. The whole movie led up to it: Americans killing redcoats with berserker abandon. This was the focus and impetus of the movie, it seemed to me, never mind all that talk about family values. However, it makes me laugh that Britain thinks the filmmakers owe their country an apology. This was a movie, my friends. The Revolution happened, but that was long ago. This is fiction, fiction geared at not very subtle thinkers, and when that's its targetted audience, it's not a very subtle movie. Forget it. Give me Peter O'Toole in _Becket_. Or better yet, _Shakespeare in Love_. Next year Hollywood will aim at the Japanese in _Pearl Harbor_. We'll see how that film compares to _The Patriot_.