Ridiculous self-indulgent rubbish

Rating: 1/10 (17 July 2000)

I've never seen a film with such astonishing revisionist tendencies as The Patriot. Its slamming of the child-eating, church-burner, deviant British is pure racism, and based on eschewing American cultural responsibility for things like slavery. In the film the claymationalike Gabriel says something facetious like, "we are fighting for a new world, and things will be new in it, not like that silly old old world where they have slavery. we'll not have any of that in the good old US of A"...
The fact that the British outlawed slavery forty years before America apparently means nothing. And the fact that when the country actually got around to it they actually had to have another whole war because one side really wanted to keep African Americans in chains - these things mean nothing to the creators of the Patriot, who are only interested in playing the evil, corrupt, power crazed, racist big monarchist bad guys against the simple farmer folk who love black people and freedom and don't really even WANT to fight and who are actually Australian in upbringing.
As films go, this one is insulting to all concerned, and particularly insulting to history and vague formless notions like TRUTH and JUSTICE (and through association, we would LIKE to assume, the American way)...