More proof that it's harder to write a good movie than film one.

Rating: 4/10 (18 July 2000)

"The Patriot" stands as further testament to the fact that with today's Hollywood money, technology, and years of filmmaking experience, producing a well-made movie is a well-understood process that the major studios can execute time and time again.
Unfortunately, finding a good script and preserving it throughout the filmmaking process seems relegated to those smaller productions that cannot afford to cover the lack of intellectual entertainment with visual stimulation.
"The Patriot" is well-designed, well-shot, competently (occasionally even excellently) acted, visually exciting, and never really boring. It's also unbelievable, formulaic, trite, unoriginal, and basically stupid. This film is "Gladiator" without the intelligence (which is pretty bad, since "Gladiator" certainly didn't shine in the original story line department).
I loved the recreation of Revolutionary war combat in the earlier battles. It may not have been historically precise, but a very good job was done depicting the bloody ruthlessness and insanity of line warfare (although I don't think that many people actually had their heads cleanly removed by cannon balls).
I hated the completely one-dimensional, totally unoriginal and ridiculously evil bad guy and detested the acutely predictable "exciting" climaxes. Mel Gibson stabbing the horse with the American Flag was SO STUPID it actually had me laughing out loud as I remembered the Simpsons episode in which Homer rewrites the script for a Mel Gibson version of "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" to include a scene in which Mel Gibson spears a Supreme Court Justice with an American flag. I find it hard to think of another scene which so completely illustrates the total contempt with which the Hollywood machine regards the intelligence of the American audience.
If there's a script-writing equivalent to a paint-by-numbers project, it was used for this film. Too bad all the good production value couldn't have been used to make an intellectually stimulating story. The entire cast and crew of "The Patriot" ought to knock Mr. Roland Rodat's head off with one of those cannon balls, he's obviously not using it anyways.