Patriot

Martin, a veteran of the French and Indian War, thinks of himself as a battle-weary peacenik (his eldest son joins the army against his wishes), but if he believes in liberating the colonies from the tyranny of King George III, he believes even more fervently in smiting the holy bejesus out of the soldiers who have torn his family apart. That these aristocratic oppressors happen to be the same redcoats who are fighting to quash the American Revolution is, shall we say, a matter of the highest moral convenience.

Written by Robert Rodat (''Saving Private Ryan'') and directed by the heavy-tromping blockbuster maestro Roland Emmerich (''Independence Day,'' ''Godzilla''), ''The Patriot'' is set in fields, forests, homes, and backwaters, and there's something at once canny and reductive about the way that it personalizes the bloody birth of a nation. The filmmakers know that the last thing contemporary audiences need is another square-shouldered Classics Illustrated lecture that regurgitates the righteous and idealistic mythology of Why We Fought the British. At the same time, I'm not sure that I want my history dragged into the colonial trenches by a filmmaker like Roland Emmerich. ''The Patriot'' has some fierce and exciting moments, and it's held together by Gibson's haggard slow-burn charisma (he talks in his ''low'' voice), but the movie is also demagogic and crude. It's a fife-and-drum ''Gladiator'' without elegance -- the Revolutionary War turned into a big, hammerheaded spectacle of getting even.

The film's most irresistible aspect is its clever populist notion of how, exactly,