THE PATRIOT

2000

Mel Gibson is the soldier-turned pacifist who is forced to go to war when his son enlists to fight the British in the Revolutionary War. Sound familiar? While director Roland Emmerich (of ID4 fame) did manage to create a big, epic film with lots of characters and battles, he failed to capture the real granduer of the fight for America's freedom. Emmerich's attempts at moving scenes often come off slightly cheesy and his attempts at injecting humor commercial. Even the battle scenes were a bit disorganized and at times looked foolish. Let me go the other way on you here, though- I liked this movie. The story was good (even though not that original), the characters likeable and very well acted and there were some really exciting scenes. The question is: did Mel actually think that no one was going to notice that this film was basically "Braveheart comes to America"?

4 Stars

CDF

Although I'm not sorry that I saw this film, I have to say that it was a complete disappointment. It's overlong by at least an hour. It's sappy, campy, soap-opera melodramatic, mushy, thoroughly predictable, and at times comical, where it was not meant to be.(There are scenes in a utopia for slaves that look like something out of "Porgy and Bess!") I can only imagine that the perfect audience for the movie would be two 14-year-olds on a date. At the risk of sounding sexist(!) he could get off on the decapitations, cannon balls and bullets ripping through human flesh ad nauseum, and she would enjoy the ridiculous soap-opera teen-agers in love. Speaking of which, these much-touted teen-age stars(especially the new Australian "hunk" Heath Ledger) are totally unbeleivable, stupid, and annoying. Nothing but big smiles in pretty faces. The violence is sadistic and a complete revision of the history of the period. The British should sue. Mel Gibson's character comes across as a cross between the Terminator and Joan of Arc...with a bit of the Gladiator thrown in. The computer graphics look really bad...a throw-back to the old days of scenes painted on glass. Everything looked fake, even the real stuff!

2.5 Stars

NJB