If you liked Braveheart, you probably liked Gladiator. They both had Australian stars playing extremely manly, likeable heroes who lead rag-tag bunches of untrained men against seemingly insurmountable forces.  Each has a really bad guy doing really rotten stuff to really innocent people.  And each of the male leads are reluctant warriors, dragged into large-scale confrontation only after somebody messes with their family in some horrible way.

The Patriot is more of the same - even more so than Gladiator - and could have saved a fortune in marketing costs by just calling itself Braveheart II:  The Phantom Menace.  In this installment, Mel Gibson battles the English on American soil during the Revolutionary War, as opposed to Braveheart's 13th century Scotland backdrop.  Gibson (Payback) plays Benjamin Martin, a man who could be a direct descendant of William Wallace (he does everything but wear the kilt and the blue face paint).

The film starts off in 1776 South Carolina.  Martin, a former war captain, has turned decidedly anti-war ever since his beloved wife went tits up. The reason for his pacifism?  He’s afraid of leaving his seven children without a father.  Martin even goes to the Continental Congress in Charleston to vote against the war, but his side loses and, to make matters worse, his oldest son Gabriel (Heath Ledger, 10 Things I Hate About You) signs up to fight the Redcoats.

Before long, the battles are literally being fought in Martin’s backyard. Gabriel is captured by the ridiculously ruthless Col. William Tavington  (Jason Isaacs, The End of the Affair) and ordered to hang for betraying King George.  Some other stuff happens that I won’t give away here, but before you know it, Martin is wielding his tomahawk and covered in English blood.  He even teaches two of his younger sons how to attack a procession of English officers.  The scene, which has already sparked a lot of debate over the whole kids/guns issue, is a revelation as both boys are so scared that they end up looking through the sights of their guns with tears in their eyes.  Kudos to screenwriter Robert Rodat (Saving Private Ryan) for this splendid scene.

Like Braveheart’s Wallace, Martin has a smart mouth, a cocky attitude and fights like he's immune to death.  He uses eyebrow-raising tricks and unconventional combat techniques, and apparently is the guy that came up with the idea of hiding behind rocks and trees while engaged in gunfire with the enemy (as opposed to marching in a straight line in a wide-open field, which was all the rage back then).  And he can mix it up like nobody’s business, brandishing a long list of weapons from guns to flagpoles.

But there are problems with Martin’s character, too.  He’s way too squeaky-clean and noble.  Even his slaves aren’t slaves (they just love working his fields).  Interestingly enough, Martin’s character is supposedly based on one Francis “The Swamp Fox” Marion, a Revolutionary War hero and noted racist that bragged about hunting American Indians for sport.  Allegedly, The Patriot was intended to be a biopic about Marion’s life, but once Sony Pictures heard about the Swamp Fox’s real-life exploits, they changed the name of the character and, as they say, the rest is history.  Here, some brief mentions are made to some atrocity that Martin may have committed against the French and the Cherokee at a place called Fort Wilderness.  But Gibson is Gibson - as long as he’s bashing people’s skulls in, the world is a happy place.

The Patriot simply looks amazing from the first frame to the last.  It’s one of those films whose scenes seem to be set during sunrise or sundown, thanks to cinematographer Caleb Deschanel’s (Anna & The King) warm photography.  There are several scenes set in a foggy graveyard marsh, where Martin and his band of merry men meet to discuss battle plans.  It looks like something out of Sleepy Hollow.  Perennial Oscar-nominee John Williams (Angela’s Ashes) score manages to press most of the right buttons.

The Patriot was produced and directed by the team that brought us Godzilla and ID4 (Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin), but this film is leaps and bounds better than those two travesties.  And this film is the second in two weeks to feature either Gibson (he lends his voice to Rocky the Rooster in the animated Chicken Run) or the underused Chris Cooper (Me, Myself & Irene), who plays Col. Harry Burwell in this picture.

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