Aimed directly at a mainstream audience, The Patriot qualifies as respectable entertainment, but anyone expecting a definitive drama about the American Revolution should look elsewhere. Rising above the blatant crowd pleasing of Stargate, Independence Day, and Godzilla, director Roland Emmerich crafts a marvelous re-creation of South Carolina in the late 1770s (aided immeasurably by cinematographer Caleb Deschanel), and Robert Rodat's screenplay offers the same balance of epic scale and emotional urgency that elevated his earlier script for Saving Private Ryan. Unfortunately, Emmerich embraces clichés and hackneyed melodrama that a more gifted director would have avoided. Instead of attempting a truly great film about the most pivotal years of American history, Emmerich settles for a standard revenge plot with the Revolutionary War as an incidental backdrop.

ROUNDSHOT

Very quickly into this film, I realized it was a Swampfox remake.

I give it two stars simply because it is the only film I've ever seen where you see the effect of artillery roundshot hitting a line of troops in close order. Not a pretty sight.

Gettysburg probably had the best artillery special effects from the blackpowder era of warfare prior to this. However, it confined itself to bursting shells and cannister. No roundshot, however, which was much more effective than the primitive shell fire of the time.

Also, once again we get treated to the stupid British regulars marching in columns and lines with the crafty Americans sniping at them from behind trees and rocks. In fact, Washington hired a Prussian drillmaster to get his troops where they were capable of fighting in columns and lines like the British as a necessary condition of winning the war. Baron von Steuben created the Continental army.

The final idiocy of the film are the Black people fighting alongside the American colonials. This is plausible in Boston with a freedman population, but not Virginia or the Carolinas. In the plantation South, the British offered slaves their freedom in exchange for military service with the British. There are communities of Black people in Eastern Canada that date back to this arrangement.

A grand old-fashioned epic

Okay, I'm going to nail my colors to the mast here: not only do I like Roland Emmerich's The Patriot, but I also think it's also a damn good film, and not just because so many films about the Revolutionary War are so pitifully bad (Revolution, cough cough). While it is driven by the simplistic revenge motif that all American epics seem to need to stand a chance at the box-office, it does give a good sense of the slow progress of the war as it deteriorated from a `civilized' confrontation waged according to the rules of battle to an increasing vicious guerrilla war for survival. The battles are convincingly brutal and for perhaps the first time in a movie it shows how cannonballs were really used - not as explosives but to smash their way through the flesh and bone of the opposing ranks of soldiers.

Yes, it glosses over the real Swamp Fox's racism in favor of an idealized vision of racial harmony and it invents a church-burning incident redolent of old anti-Nazi propaganda films (revenge on Herr Director's part, perhaps?), but it's not quite as simplistic as that. For much of the first half Mel Gibson's character takes no prisoners himself, taking genuine pleasure in killing surrendering British troops until he persuaded to stop more for propaganda reasons than moral ones. Similarly, it points out that this was initially very much a civil war, with colonial settlers divided among themselves over where their loyalties lay (people tend to forget that rather than Americans vs. British, it was British vs. British at that time). Certainly history gets a better deal here than it did in Gibson's own Braveheart. And give it credit for at least not having Gibson stab the bad guy with Old Glory.

Don't use it as a history lesson by any means, though it's not quite the travesty outraged tabloids have implied, but as a lavish, old-fashioned epic, complete with a cast of thousands (even if many of them are digital), glorious widescreen photography and a fine score by John Williams. The theatrical cut boasts a good array of extras, with some featurettes and trailers that were not carried over to the extended cut that is also available.

Beautiful-Looking DVD Highlights Powerful Story

This is "Braveheart" all over again, except instead of mid-whatever-century Scotland and England, it's the United States and the American Revolution. Mel Gibson plays a similarly-heroic person he played in Braveheart but he's still fighting the British, time time as an American patriot "Benjamin Martin."

The cinematography is a high point in this movie, with lots of pretty shots outside and inside. It's just stunning at times. Kudos to cinematographer Caleb Deschanel for a job well done. It's also a terrific audio movie with a lot of surround sound that's impressive, especially when the cannons are shot.

Yes, this is All-American flag-waving which nauseates some but makes most the U.S. citizens happy and it's certainly something one hasn't seen much in films since the 1950s.

Even though it's considered an "epic," I would like to have seen this cut down a bit from 165 minutes which is a tad long. Women beware: this gets a little bloody in parts. It's not as gory as Braveheart, but there is still a good deal of violence.

In all, a powerful story beautifully filmed.