There’s a reason well-known character actor Gregg Henry (Body Double, Payback, Slither) has spent the majority of his career playing a succession of creeps, criminals, douchebags and assholes: He’s really, really good at it.
This explains why the strange attempt to turn him into a standard-issue action hero in The Patriot is the only remotely novel aspect of a film that could otherwise be described as what would happen if someone tried to make an Andy Sidaris movie without any of the good parts (insert de rigueur boob joke here).
It casts Henry as a former Navy SEAL who was dishonorably discharged from ’Nam when he refused to take part in a pointless raid on a defenseless village, but who gets a chance to restore his good name when the death of a friend alerts him to a (poorly thought-out and rather nonsensical) conspiracy to smuggle stolen nukes out of the country through oil pipelines.
That synopsis is far more coherent than the actual movie, which lacks the kind of urgency you’d expect from an action thriller about potential Armageddon. All of this can be blamed on its nonexistent budget, atrocious editing and a script (co-written by former B-movie vixen and future Poison Ivy director Katt Shea Rubin) that must have been a lot harder to type than write.
The Patriot is so low-rent, it doesn’t even rise to the level of the cheap, Cannon-produced actioners that obviously inspired it. A direct-to-video effort made before the concept of direct-to-video actually existed, it’s a deservedly forgotten effort that even the biggest Henry fan shouldn’t feel compelled to discover. —Allan Mott