Good cinematography, mediocre movie

Rating: 2/10 (3 July 2000)

First of all, there is nothing about patriotism in this movie, except some motivational speeches that are glued into the movie especially to remind the viewer about the patriotic feeling that he's supposed to be experiencing, like the rallying up the men discourse in the church, when half of the audience in the theatre was laughing out loud.
The movie is about primal reactions in the face of cruelty and violence inflicted upon your beloved or simply upon innocent people. That's what has driven Benjamin Martin (Mel Gibson's character) in the previous war, when he became a legend, and that's what drives him now. He first reacts to save his elder brother from being hanged and to avenge his other son's death, and keeps on fighting in order to protect his son, and later again out of the wish for revenge and for not letting his son's ideals die with him.
The scenes in the movie seem artificially connected, and the moral speeches actually disturb the mood and the pace the movie is managing at some point to settle into.
Instead of being a good action movie, set in the Independence war period and showing some of the drama that happened then and the way people reacted (or actually how they were forced to react) to it, the movie resorts to the overused and overhyped american virtues and places them at the wrong moments and in the wrong tone, destroying also the quality of the action flick.
In spite of good cinematography, and good performances by Tcheky Karyo and Jason Isaacs, I only gave the movie a 4/10 which I might change later into a 5.