Gibson's run at the box office

Mel Gibson is a happy man this week. Tired to the point of exhaustion, as he sucks a cigarette down to its filter in a Los Angeles hotel suite, but undeniably happy. Opening last Wednesday, his new film, The Patriot, grabbed the number one spot at the box office on the eve of its US premiere. Notably, it came at the expense of another movie, Chicken Run, the Aardman animated feature in which Gibson also happens to lend his voice to a rebellious rooster named Rocky.

"They're both freedom-fighters," laughs the star, summing up the film-going mood of a nation on its Independence Day weekend. "One's got a beak and the other has a musket." And both films look set to do considerably well at the box office despite stiff competition. Chicken Run, in which Gibson's rooster leads a rebellious band of poultry determined to escape the dinner table, has already earned $41.1 million in the US. The Patriot, in which he plays Benjamin Martin, a reluctant Revolutionary War hero, is now expected to take $40-45 million when the box office closes today, ultimately vying with George Clooney's The Perfect Storm for poll position.

"It was simply a great story. It comes down to that every time," says Gibson, of his decision to take on The Patriot, a two-and-a-half-hour-plus film likely to unnerve sticklers for historical accuracy and delight the star's fans in equal measure when it opens in the UK in two weeks' time.

Set in 1776, the story follows the path of a South Carolina plantation farmer who is inexorably drawn into the uprising. A widowed father of seven and former military hero-turned pacifist, he is ultimately compelled to take up arms against the English when his eldest son, Gabriel (Heath Ledger), is captured by the King's army and sentenced to death.

The screenplay comes from Robert Rodat of Saving Private Ryan fame, and shares that film's vivid appetite for the horrors of battle. The director, however, is Roland Emmerich, who helmed both Independence Day and Godzilla, and who enhances Rodat's script with lots of flag-waving, bouts of derailing cliché and syrupy kitsch.

"A mix of sentimentality and brutality that suggests a Lethal Weapon movie directed by Norman Rockwell," according to The New York Times; "a brutishly compelling broad-canvas entertainment," as described by Entertainment Weekly. In particular, though, most simply questioned the film's historical accuracy. "Did the British army really commit Nazi-like atrocities during the Revolutionary War," asked Associated Press.

According to the screenwriter Robert Rodat, many of the battle scenes depicted (along with Gibson's fictional war hero) are "composites" based on actual events and people. The fictional story of "an ordinary family facing extraordinary circumstances," he stresses, is what's at the core here. It earned an R certificate in the States, restricting its under-17 audience, due to the brutal depictions of battle.

"The violence in this film doesn't desensitise," argues producer Dean Devlin. "I think it sensitises. I think it horrifies. It's not something that feels good, it's something that feels awful. At one point we tried to reduce the violence. And every time we started to cut it down, we found it was actually glorifying it, because it made it more 'fun' to watch. Roland didn't want this to be easy to look at. He wanted it to be horrible to look at. And you know what, if it encouraged everyone in Britain to pick up their history books and take a look at it, that would be the greatest compliment."

The film was first offered to Harrison Ford who reportedly rejected it after voicing concerns over the bellicose content. Gibson, for his part, passed on the blockbuster hit Gladiator to make The Patriot, and claims to have no regrets.

"I liked the script and it came out well," he says of the Ridley Scott film. "But you don't have time to do them all. I got [the scripts for] Gladiator, The Patriot and The Perfect Storm at the same time. They all hit me in the same week ... I liked them all. But you gotta pick one."