Movie Review: Outlaw King

Outlaw King ** / *****

Directed by: David Mackenzie.

Written by: Bathsheba Doran & David Mackenzie & James MacInnes and David Harrower & Mark Bomback.

Starring: Chris Pine (Robert Bruce, Earl of Carrick), Florence Pugh (Elizabeth Burgh), Aaron Taylor-Johnson (James Douglas, Lord of Douglas), Stephen Dillane (King Edward I of England), Billy Howle (Edward, Prince of Wales),Sam Spruell (Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke), Jonny Phillips (Richard de Burgh, Earl of Ulster), Kevin Mains (John Macduff, Earl of Buchan), Callan Mulvey (John III Comyn, Lord of Badenoch), Tony Curran (Angus Og Macdonald, Lord of Islay), James Cosmo (Robert Bruce Senior), Alastair Mackenzie (John Strathbogie, Earl of Atholl), Lorne MacFadyen (Neil Bruce), Jack Greenlees (Alexander Bruce), Chris Fulton (Euan Bruce).

 

I wasn’t much of a fan of Mel Gibson’s Braveheart when I saw it upon its release back in 1995. Yes, the battle sequences were massively impressive, but I was left cold by so much else in that film. Had I known then though that the success of that film would give rise to many, many other historical epics like it – and almost all of them would be lesser than Braveheart, perhaps I would have been kinder. For the most part, these epics have fallen off in recent years – and judging by Outlaw King, which pretty much tries to tell the story of what happened after William Wallace was killed by the English, they should probably stay that way.

 

To be fair, filmmaking on this scale is always impressive at least on a logistical level – and so it is with Outlaw King, which is a film with huge battles and thousands of extras and it is impressively mounted in terms of things like art direction and costume design. Yet, telling the story of Robert Bruce’s long war to take control of Scotland back from the English, feels like a much bigger story than this two-hour movie could possibly contain, and everything in it seems rushed. There are so many characters, and the all look the same, that other than the few top billed actors, no one really stands out. The film is more than a little bit of a slog between one battle sequence and the next, and while those are handled well by director David Mackenzie, they don’t come close to Gibson’s battle sequences in Braveheart – and are basically merely competent, when they should be thrilling.

 

It doesn’t help much that at the center of the movie is Chris Pine’s performance as Bruce. Pine is not Scottish – and his accent isn’t terrible, but it isn’t great either, and seems to fade in and out at times – and looks particularly weak when speaking with actual Scottish actors. Pine seems to want to play Bruce as a kind of stoic leader – a man of few words, who lets his actions speak loudest. But there is a difference between stoic and dull, and Pine comes out on the wrong side of that line. You cannot accuse Aaron Taylor-Johnson as underplaying his role as James Douglas – a man who has watched his family destroyed by the British, and even has his name taken away, as Taylor-Johnson revels in the bloodlust of all the battles. Yet, there’s no real character for him to play here, and watching the film on Netflix with my wife, we had more fun making fun of how many times he yelling out the name Douglas when killing people than actually watching his performance. Billy Howle, who I didn’t much like in either On Chesil Beach or The Seagull this year, continues his streak of delivering performances I don’t like, as the Prince of Wales – an idiot, but like Taylor-Johnson he tries to go over the top, but with less success.

 

The only performance in the movie I really liked was Florence Pugh, as the Englishwoman who becomes Bruce’s second wife. I loved Pugh in last year’s Lady Macbeth – and apparently so did everyone who saw it, because she’s showing up in everything this year, and I’m all for it. Her performance and role start off strong – she is a smart, strong woman, who takes her husband’s side, and pushes him forward – but eventually, the movie even wastes her talents as she becomes the more typical woman in distress that these movies all have.

 

Director David Mackenzie has had an interesting career – he is a workman like director more than an auteur, and he was likely given the budget Netflix gave him for this film (around $90 million) because of the success of his last film, Hell or High Water, which starred Pine in his finest work to date as an actor. Perhaps Mackenzie just works better on a smaller scale – as a production of this size just kind of gets away from him. You can make the argument however that in this day of age, a limited series would be better for this type of a story – a 10-hour epic, that had the chance to define the characters by more than one-character trait, and didn’t seem so much in a rush to get to the next impressively mounted battle scene. The flip side to that of course is that had a limited series been as deathly dull as this movie, it would be painful to watch - although your friend, who seemingly binge watches every Netflix series the day it was released would be sure to tell you that it gets better after about 7 hours, and you just have to stick with it – so maybe we’re better off just wasting two hours of your life on this movie.