Mad Max meets Braveheart - history a casualty

Rating: Null/10 (31 August 2000)

I did not view this movie under ideal conditions (I saw it in a technically inadequate theatre in downtown Lima, Peru) and perhaps it can be enjoyed for the spectacle, but it is essentially a rather personal story that does not work. Martin, played by Mel Gibson, with various demons in his past, goes to the Revolutionary War (1776 and all that) to avenge the death of his son. We get American heros (apart from the odd loyalist traitor), English villains except perhaps for General Cornwallis (good work by Tom Wilkinson) who does come across as something of a gentleman. Martin wages a guerrilla campaign against the British as unprincipled as the (now defunct) Shining Path in Peru. The British, under Martin's nemesis Colonel Tavington (a smooth and nasty Jason Issacs) hit back hard, the population suffering greatly as a result.
The tide is turned, not by Martin and his band, but by the intervention of the French and the battle of Yorktown. So Martin has killed a lot of people, and for what? What's the point of patriotism if it's motivated by personal revenge? (At the outset, Martin is all for negotiating with dear (not so old) mad King George). If it had been the filmmakers' intention to make that point there would be no point in complaining, but instead Martin is presented as a man doing what a man's gotta do. I also took great exception to the church burning scene when as far as we know nothing like that ever happened in the Revolutionary War, though the Nazis did a fair bit of that sort of thing in World War 2.
Heath Ledger does nicely as Martin's son Gabriel, and I'm sure we'll see him again. After this one though I'm not sure I want to see Mel Gibson again in a movie. His is a thoroughly wooden performance, though not helped by a script full of cliches and anachronisms (eg the reference to black emancipation). Even 6 soles (US$2) was too much to pay for this film. No, read a good book about the Revolutionary War instead.