A towel, please, to wipe off the blood

Rating: Null/10 (2 July 2000)

....so this summer, after having seen Gladiator, MI-2, rented The Messenger (Joan of Arc through the sensitive eyes of Luc Besson), we come to see The Patriot. Perhaps it's the cumulative effect of all of the gore of all of these movies, but the final impression this movie makes on me is graphic violence raised to pornographic levels. Mel in the stream, covered with gore, chopping away. Slo-mo Mel being all Indian guerilla and popping lead through peoples heads. Cannon fu, as Joe Bob Briggs would say; knife fu, melted lead soldier fu (that was OK the first time it showed up, but give us a break!), beheading fu, "lost my leg" fu. And the final, totally predictable right down to every saber cut and knife thrust, fight with the Evil Brit - for this vengeance we have to wait two hours and wade through buckets of blood and mutilation?
Well, be that as it may, The Patriot is an expertly done piece of work (and if that sounds like damning with faint praise, you have good ears). The battle scenes recall Kurosawa and the director has a great sense of how to tell a story, a non-trivial job given the geographic scope and number of characters. I did like the members of Benjamin's family, and Joely Richardson, WonderBra and all, is convincing as Mel's future wife. And the start of the movie, up to the point past Farmer Martin's "I won't fight - don't ask me" speech, is moving and affecting.
But the moment Mr. Jason Isaacs (the head Bad Guy) appears you can pretty much tell what's going to happen right through to the end, (vengeance, baby!) and even though predictability isn't a fatal flaw in a movie, in this case, that plus the decision to never put in an ounce of subtlety, combined with the nauseating level of violence, and the absolute lack of any shades of grey in any important character makes this a loud, long, painful ordeal. This may be the first (and perhaps the last) ever hit movie about the American Revolution, and I'm sure it'll be one of the biggest movies of the year. Like politicians, we get the movies we deserve.