Patriot,

A violent, and sometimes vile, action movie decked out as a sensationalistic diorama of Revolutionary America, the spectacular period-piece elements little more than pretexts for yet another cinematic tale of bloody revenge. Its title character is a war-haunted South Carolinian (Mel Gibson), a patriarchal widower raising a bevy of kids and running a prosperous-looking plantation with the help of an indeterminate number of black servants, none of whom (we are told) is actually a slave. Presumably, the film intends for us to take the guy as a patriotic hero for all seasons, but way too much of it is awash in the morbid sentimentality that permits Gibson and company to wallow in the faux-symbolism of a father making bullets with lead from his murdered son’s toy soldiers. The film pays lip service to a range of political and historical issues, but its true emotional center lies in the hero’s battle against a sadistic British officer (Jason Isaacs), who is nothing less than the latest movie incarnation of The Thing That Wouldn’t Die—an especially convenient circumstance for a story that wants its guilty hero to go on killing, but without the guilt.