Roland Emmerich’s The Patriot wants to be an epic about principle. It keeps turning into an epic about revenge. The film runs 165 minutes and follows Benjamin Martin (Mel Gibson), a French and Indian War veteran and widower raising seven children in Berkeley County, South Carolina. He wants nothing to do with a war against Great Britain. Then his son is murdered, and the movie becomes something else.
Trailer, via HD Retro Trailers.
Berkeley County, 1776
The opening vote sets up the film’s best idea. Benjamin is called to Charles Town to vote in the South Carolina General Assembly on a levy supporting the Continental Army. He abstains, fearing war and unwilling to force other men to fight when he will not. The vote passes anyway. His oldest son, Gabriel (Heath Ledger), enlists against his father’s wishes.
That tension — a man who won’t fight watching his son go — is worth a movie. Emmerich and writer Robert Rodat don’t trust it for long.
In 1780, Charlestown is besieged by the British Army. A wounded Gabriel returns home carrying rebel dispatches. The Martins care for wounded soldiers on both sides before British dragoons arrive, led by Colonel William Tavington (Jason Isaacs). Tavington’s men seize the family’s African-American former slaves and force them into the army, and Tavington arrests Gabriel as a spy. Gabriel’s brother Thomas tries to free him. Tavington kills the boy, orders the house burned and the wounded Americans executed.
Isaacs Plays the Villain
This is the hinge, and Isaacs plays it with real menace. He is the film’s most effective element and its most dishonest one. Tavington is a fictional composite, and the film hands him atrocities the historical record does not support as depicted. The cruelty lands because Isaacs commits. It also flatters the audience into a simple hatred that the real war does not earn.
Gibson’s Benjamin is a harder sell. He is a composite drawn from several figures, including Francis Marion — and the film sands off the real men’s wartime conduct. The movie wants us to see a farmer pushed too far. It also stages his ambush of the British convoy transporting Gabriel as a slaughter. Benjamin and two younger sons kill every soldier. The brutality frightens his own children.
That scene is the movie’s sharpest and most honest. It shows what the revenge story actually costs. Then the film mostly forgets it.
A Colonel Named Burwell
Gabriel rejoins the Continentals. Benjamin follows, leaving the younger children with his sister-in-law, Charlotte Selton (Joely Richardson). He meets his former commanding officer, Colonel Harry Burwell (Chris Cooper), who makes him a colonel and tasks him with raising a militia to weaken Lord Cornwallis’ regiments through guerrilla warfare. Gabriel serves under his father.
Burwell exists to hand out exposition and rank. Cooper is a fine actor given almost nothing to do. The same is true of Tom Wilkinson’s Cornwallis, who drifts through the back half as a foil for Tavington rather than a character.
French Major Jean Villeneuve (Tchéky Karyo) trains the militia and promises more French aid. The film treats this as a plot convenience. France’s role in the war gets a few scenes and no weight.
The Cast Emmerich Didn’t Get
The casting history is more interesting than stretches of the finished film. Harrison Ford turned down the lead, calling the movie “too violent” and saying “it boiled the American Revolution down to one guy wanting revenge.” Ford was right, and it is worth noting that the man who passed saw the problem clearly.
- Gibson was paid a record $25 million for the role.
- Jude Law was offered Tavington and turned it down; the part went to Isaacs after an audition tape.
- Joshua Jackson, Elijah Wood, Jake Gyllenhaal and Brad Renfro were considered for Gabriel Martin.
- Producers and Emmerich narrowed Gabriel to Ryan Phillippe and Heath Ledger, choosing Ledger for what Emmerich called his “exuberant youth.”
Ledger is the best thing in the movie. He brings a lightness the script doesn’t deserve, and his scenes with Gibson carry a warmth the battle sequences can’t match.
Three Nominations, One Problem
The film premiered in Century City on June 27, 2000, and opened in the United States on June 30, 2000, through Sony Pictures Releasing. It grossed $215 million against a $110 million budget. It was nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Cinematography and Best Original Score.
Those nominations are the tell. The craft is real. The camera work and score do enormous lifting, selling emotion the writing hasn’t built. Emmerich knows how to stage a battle. He does not know when to stop.
At 165 minutes, The Patriot has room for the story it wants to tell and spends much of it on spectacle. The middle stretch — militia raids, training montages, Cornwallis maneuvering — blurs together. The film’s tagline promises a story about family becoming soldiers. What it delivers is a story about a father who becomes very good at killing and is never seriously asked to reckon with it.
What the Controversy Actually Shows
The Patriot drew significant controversy for its historical inaccuracies, particularly its fictionalized British figures and atrocities. The criticism of Benjamin as a whitewashed composite is fair and specific. The film invents a villain to carry the war’s cruelty and invents a hero to carry its virtue. Neither holds up.
This matters beyond nitpicking. A war film can take liberties and still be honest about what war does to people. The Patriot takes liberties in the direction of comfort. It gives the audience a monster to hate and a grieving father to cheer. The real Marion owned slaves and fought a dirtier war than the movie admits. The real British army was not a pack of cartoon dragoons.
The film’s defenders would say it is entertainment, not history. That’s a reasonable position. But the movie keeps reaching for historical weight — the assembly vote, the French alliance, Cornwallis himself — while retreating to fantasy whenever the truth gets complicated.
The Score at the End
The Patriot is a well-made film with a hollow center. Gibson is sturdy, Ledger is genuinely good, and Isaacs makes a villain you remember. Emmerich’s direction is competent and occasionally striking. The score and cinematography earned their nominations.
What’s missing is a point of view about the war itself. The film has a point of view about revenge — it knows a man’s brutality should frighten his children — and then abandons it. The last hour asks us to enjoy the killing we were earlier invited to fear.
The historical controversy isn’t a side issue. It’s the same problem in a different register. The movie can’t decide whether it wants to be about the cost of violence or the thrill of it, so it serves both and means neither.
For a 165-minute epic with this cast and this budget, that’s a real failure. It’s also a watchable one. The performances hold, the battle scenes move, and Ledger’s presence is a genuine pleasure. But The Patriot is a film you remember in pieces, not as a whole.
Twenty-six years after its release, the film’s reputation rests mostly on the controversy its makers invited. The revenge story still works. The history still doesn’t.
6.3 of 10.
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