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Synopsis: On the eve of the American Revolution, Benjamin Martin (Mel Gibson), a veteran of the French and Indian War, is building a life for his family on his plantation in South Carolina. He supports the cause of independence from England, but he is a man with a family to raise and he doesn't wish to leave them fatherless. His hotheaded oldest son doesn't see eye to eye with his pacifism and enlists in the Continental Army. When the fighting eventually reaches Martin's plantation, Martin tends the wounded of both sides, even as his son, now a military courier, staggers home. When the British take the farm, a sadistic colonel (Jason Isaacs) orders Martin's son hanged as a spy and the house and barn burned. During the fracas, one of Martin's younger sons is killed. Martin is pushed into the war, where he conducts a guerrilla campaign against General Cornwallis, who has swept the Continentals from the field in South Carolina and has no one to oppose his march north. By now, Martin has achieved a reputation as a "Ghost" and the British are hell bent for his death or capture. They attempt to smoke him out with brutal terrorist tactics even as Martin continues to harry their forces. Meanwhile, the war has taken on a personal dimension for Martin, as he seeks the death of the colonel who killed his son: "Before this war is over," he tells him, "I'm going to kill you." The war in The South comes to a head when the Continentals under General Green and the British under Cornwallis fight a battle with the fate of the war at stake. Martin's militia volunteer to help the Continentals and a devious battle plan is enacted....

Dark Territory: There is a point about forty minutes into The Patriot when the whole thing threatens to slip the leash and rampage into uncharted territory. The film has taken some heat for being based on the less than heroic figure of Francis Marion, "The Swamp Fox," who was notoriously racist, who enjoyed hunting Chrerokee Indians for sport, and who was guilty of attrocities as bad as or worse than those attributed to the British in this movie, but at the heart of the movie, in this one scene, there is a sense of the man who inspired the film. The scene: Martin's farm has just been put to the torch, his second eldest son killed, and his eldest son taken away in chains for the hangman. Martin storms his burning house to retrieve his guns and a tomahawk taken as a trophy during his wilder days. He arms his youngest sons (neither of which is older than twelve) with the muskets and they take off through the woods to rescue his oldest son. "Start with the officers and work your way down," he tells his boys as he sets up the ambush. "Aim small, miss small" he instructs as he positions them to snipe the British. The ambush is a frenzy of violence as, his guns expended, Martin wades into the surviving British soldiers with his tomahawk and massacres them in hand to hand combat. One surviving British soldier is blown into the nearby stream. As he tries to crawl away, Martin kills him from behind with the tomahawk, and keeps chopping as his horrified sons look on. Martin is a madman at this point, drenched in blood with a frightening light of madness in his eyes. He is certainly not a heroic figure here and the scene is profoundly shocking. An audience expecting the lighthearted mayhem of, say, a Lethal Weapon movie is going to sit in the theater after this scene in stunned silence. It's an engergizing sequence, certainly the best thing Roland Emmerich has ever put on film, and hints at the movie The Patriot could have been. There are other glimpses of this--from the set piece battles that demonstrate the sheer madness and horror of eighteenth century warfare (one of the film's strongest images is a soldier being decapitated by a cannonball), to the personal skirmishes between Martin's militiamen and the British patrols where, in a bloodthirsty frenzy, they execute the British soldiers who have surrendered. The film COULD have been a trenchant examination of what constitutes heroism and of the kind of men who are often celebrated as heros. The film's title COULD have been bitterly ironic. The film COULD have been a dark examination of what drives men to violence. It could have been a contender....but....

Every time the film threatens to slip the leash, the scene is followed with some kind of banal sentimental hogwash which defuses its characters' rage and calls them to a higher purpose, or a scene of banal comedy relief intended to let the audience off the hook. The film also casts the British as such monsters that it is impossible for the audience to see both sides of the equation (when they burn a chuch filled with civillians, all hope of a balanced view of the war is lost). In between energizing scenes are lax, lazy scenes which pad the length of the movie unmercifully. There are two movies here: a dark masterpiece yearning to get out and the Hollywood pablum designed to keep it in check. The result is a hopeless muddle that doesn't trust the audience with challenging material and which feels the need to feed them a "ride" movie as junk food. This is too bad, really.

More troublesome, though, is The Patriot's depiction of Eighteenth Century South Carolina as some kind of egalitarian Eden where the white and the black live in some kind of natural harmony. One racist militiaman has a change of heart after a black soldier saves his life in a skirmish. Later, after the black man is free, the ex-racist tells him that it has been an honor to serve with him. Yeah, right. Or, to cite another example: when the British are searching for Martin's family, they hide in a gullah, which is a village of runaway slaves (the nature of this village is never stated explicitly in the movie, by the way). There is no tension in the air as the inhabitants of the village take in and shelter the white plantation owners, nor does there seem to be any threat to the village itself. Yeah, right. This kind of careless revisionism is chilling--it seems that any honest depiction of the history of racism in America is now forbidden by the cult of political correctness.

The Patriot is a puzzling movie. It works marvellously in fits and starts, occasionally coming to a vivid kind of life that is rare in Hollywood epics. It is certainly Roland Emmerich's best movie (no big feat, admittedly....). But it still panders to the audience. It still treats the audience as drooling infants who can't make up their own minds about what they are watching. This is an unforgivable sin. When you get right down to it, Roland Emmerich is STILL just going through the motions, aping his idol, Steven Spielberg (in Saving Private Ryan mode here--Ryan screenwriter, Robert Rodat is credited as writing this film), without understanding a whit of Spielberg's craft or or appeal. Ack...