MEL VS. THE BRITS.

• Author: ROTHENBERG, ROBERT S.
• Position: Review

We don't know exactly what the British did to tick Mel Gibson off, but the Australian-American superstar obviously is nursing some sort of a grudge. While Hollywood has long treated England kindly--sometimes even fawningly so--Gibson has taken off the cinematic gloves in two spectacular movies.

Braveheart (Paramount Home Entertainment, 179 minutes, $29.99) racked up five Oscars in 1996, including best picture and best director for Gibson, who starred behind the camera as well as before it. As 13th-century Scottish hero William Wallace, mounting a war to drive the occupying British army from his homeland, Gibson is properly intense and impassioned, although he comes off a little long in the tooth in love scenes with his childhood sweetheart. The movie is aided immeasurably by the absolutely loathsome English King Edward the Longshanks (Edward I), portrayed with lip-smacking delight by Patrick McGoohan, once again proving the eternal movie verity that a great hero must have a great villain to play against. Yet, it is Gibson the director who draws the most kudos, with a natural affinity for spectacle and bloodcurdling battle scenes, without giving short shrift to the human element. The British are depicted throughout in a highly unflattering manner, up to and including their ultimate execution of Wallace, who is drawn and quartered and disemboweled in all of their gruesome details.

The Patriot (Columbia TriStar Home Video, 165 minutes, $27.96), though, is the picture that really raised English hackles when the blockbuster was released in the summer of 2000. This drama of a reluctant warrior dragged into the American Revolution against his will portrays the Redcoats as a Nazi-like occupying army, with the...