MOVIE REVIEW: The Patriot (2000)

2000 was a good year for movies, or at least what I remember of it. Among them, we had Gladiator, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Almost Famous, and Traffic at our disposal. And then there was The Patriot, an underrated historical-drama/war picture directed by disaster-film cheesemeister Roland Emmerich and starring Mel Gibson; in the days before he went "Four Loko" on us. Like most films of it's kind, to call The Patriot 100% historically accurate is questionable, but does it manage to entertain in some way, shape, or form? Certainly.

The story concerns a widowed farmer, who takes a pacifist stance on the eve of the American Revolution when tensions have risen at their highest. After one of his sons is killed trying to save another from persecution by the gallows, the farmer has a change of heart and joins the militia with his eldest son as they fight to protect Charleston, South Carolina. The Patriot grapples with many themes of honor in war, and revenge versus compassion, this is where I felt the film's strongest points were. It also helps when you have a strong, symphonic score by John Williams and some incredible set design. There were times because of the meticulous attention to these details, the melancholy score, and the plot that I felt things were very reminiscent to Braveheart. Obviously, Mel's presence doesn't help things much, but I don't think it would have mattered either way. It was a welcome sense of familiarity that kept my interest throughout the film's two-and-a-half hour length.

Emmerich's presence as a director made me nervous at first, but now I consider this to be one of, if not, his best film. He brings the right level of tension and alacrity to the action scenes, yet he does do a few things that bothered me. One of them was giving Mel Gibson near-superhuman strength in a sequence where he takes down a caravan of 20 redcoats along with his miraculously crackshot juvenile sons. Another was Mel's final showdown, where he makes the beaten hero pull a last-minute-hat-trick-in-order-to-kill-the-bad-guy cliche. It's done well, but it's still a cliche (and amusingly bears uncanny resemblance to the Maximus/Commodus fight in Gladiator). What bothers me the most, probably is the artistic liberties taken with history - there were a few glaring ones that I don't really feel like going into detail, but that's something unavoidable with these films.

I still enjoyed The Patriot because of how it portrayed the ire of many Americans of the time through a select few fictional characters as a representative sample. Most obviously is the one of Gibson, who resolves to fight in order to justify his son's sacrifice. It hits a little closer to home when my country is still in the midst of a war right now, but all historical innacuracies aside, thank goodness historical fiction at least allows us to think.

8/10

Peace,
- Jon