As a general rule, viruses make good movie villains once, while all others comply with the same fundamental formula. The reasoning is simple. Most films about viruses are far to flustered with the cure and not the environmental challenge that is presented within the motions. But this one doesn't do that, it loses its focus far too soon for that to happen, quickly dropping presented ideas and changing into a cat and mouse chase film between hero and villain. Outbreak comes to mind when I think of a good virus movie. It worked because it made its virus just as much an equal as the cast and story alike It understood its situations instead of just presenting them. This film is imbalanced. It doesn't care about its virus as anything more than a plot device. It switches rapidly from a catastrophic virus idea to a blood omen between a doctor with a taste for martial arts and a fascist dictator, with little room for idea or conscience ideology. The Patriot is a ridiculous, low-rent, political thriller that is so short on logic it never seems to deliver, even through its desperate attempts to preach morality. It sees Steven Seagal as Wesley McClaren, a medical genius (?), fighting to find the cure for a deadly virus that the government has failed to keep under control. The film opens with a cattle-roping scene that felt like an old western film, light-hearted and fun. It then travels into a small town where a patriotic psychopath named Floyd is preparing to release a stolen virus onto the world to make it pay for the wrong doings of unjust governments, in the style of a hard-boiled thriller. But the villains didn't anticipate one thing. The antidote that they stole doesn't cure the virus; it only slows it down. Just as luck would have it McClaren and his band of heroes seem immune to the effects of the virus, never wearing masks during close patient encounters, yet never displaying symptoms, an explanation to which, that is so evidently beseeching that it is almost infuriating. Because of this the Floyd and his men want the blood of McClaren's daughter. In seeing that she has not contracted a reaction to the disease, they have reason to believe that an antidote can be formed from her blood before the virus gets the best of them. Half the fun of a film like this is imagining how the situation, as unpredictable as it is, can be brought to a close in logical terms. It has to seem an impossible task to dispose of an air born virus in order to keep the audience on the edge of their seats, always wondering how far from unworkable the solution can be. It also needs to do so in a realistic manner. Viruses are huge ideas. They spread without detections and men cannot confine them by standing in front of roadblocks with automatic weapons.. This leaves the writer with a huge task to accomplish; brining a solution to a huge problem with no set outcome that, 1) wraps up the story and, 2) leaves no reason for the audience to feel that the solution was a improbable remedy. Providing no doubt in anyone with the fact that everything is back to normal. This film achieves neither. I didn't wonder how this situation would be taken care of because I never had reason to feel any threat from it. The direction for Dean Semler gave the virus a feeling of confinement, making it a background fixture that only is given warning to when it is needed to advance a plot point. The ending was also oblivious; an obvious statement about the integrity of the environment as apposed to man made technology, which in the end possesses the power to destroy us all. It even talks about the rituals and impact of Aboriginal Spirituality and how it is taken for granted by the material world, but never really relating it to story at large. It would seem that the environment has finally overcome the action in Seagal films as this one sees itself driven more by the message than the actions of it. Although overly violent, Seagal spends the majority of this film in front of a computer as apposed to dispensing that style of lethal street justice that has made many of his past films so imprudently pleasurable. Besides the confinement of the direction, the acting form Steven Seagal is, well... why bother? Seagal has played the same stone faced, mystic that he has played in all of his staring roles. He brings nothing fresh to the table here. But in a ray of sunshine, young Camilla Belle sells every scene she is in with her mature conviction that gives her a feeling of concern that is detectable just by the look in her eyes. The problem with the Patriot does not necessarily lye in its ideas that the world will see its demise at the hands of a man made disease unless we stop taking nature for granted. The problem is in the idea that the world will end at the hands of a tired action formula that has little care for itself.
Review of The Patriot
