The Patriot

I don't know about you, but my butt starts to squirm when I hear Steven Seagal use words like "ideology" (Ideology? We don't need no stinkin' ideology, Big Steve; we need to see justice served. In spades. Preferably with good bone-crunching sound effects.) Watching this direct-to-video effort, action fans will think they've died and gone to Andrew Weil-land. Seagal, who throws all of, like, three punches, plays Wesley McClaren, a once-renowned biologist-cum-Montana naturopath, who lets hard-workin' folk slide on their vitamin supplement bills, makes house calls (yeah, right) and talks in Holistic Cowboy ("we'll git that kidney up and runnin'"). When some ultra-right-wing Republican militia whack job named Floyd Chisolm (Gailard Sartain) is a) captured, and then b) hawks a loogie (riddled with a stolen government toxic warfare viral airborne agent) into the judge's face (clearly contempt), the people in Wherever-the-Hell, Montana start getting mighty sick, mighty fast. Unfortunately, for Floyd and the others, the ace-up-the-sleeve antidote turns out to be a little weak in the bee pollen knees, and townfolk and militiafolk start pushing up cow patties in equal numbers. You'd think that this would be the cue for a certain someone to don a gas mask and start kicking some militia tail, but no, what we get instead is squinting through microscopes and third-rate mumbled lectures on biological warfare, the drawbacks of Western medicine and the almighty wisdom of Native American elders. A bummer (but on so many different levels), The Patriot is not recommended. (R. Pitman)