Outlaw King...and the Braveheart comparisons

IWAS at home in charge of a toddler

on the evening of Sunday,

September 3, 1995, as his mother

escorted Mel Gibson down the red

carpet for the European premiere of

Braveheart at Stirling’s Macrobert Art Centre, where she was then in charge of press and marketing.

It was quite an event, I understand, although a projection hiccup interrupted the screening immediately before the crucial battle scene at Stirling Brig. A considerable crowd lined the streets to catch a glimpse of the stars making their way to the after-party at the castle, estimated as “thousands” in an eyewitness account by the deputy editor of the university’s appositely named student newspaper Brig.

Compared with the coverage given to the Edinburgh gala for David Mackenzie’s new film Outlaw King, the hoo-ha around Braveheart was huge, and the overwritten verbiage that appeared in The Herald at the time is verging on the embarrassing to read now.

It is hard to put this down to the film’s novelty value, as the year had already seen Michael Caton-Jones’ Rob Roy, which many would still say is the superior movie based on Scottish history. The toddler’s mother and I had been for dinner in the country house hotel now owned by Andy Murray during the shooting of that, when I had smiled and said hello to someone I recognised at a nearby table. “That’s Liam Neeson, you fool,” she’d hissed.

With that sort of personal history, as well as a name like mine, I was very pleased to be able to attend the Outlaw King hoolie and wore my new Ancient Bruce tartan cravat for the occasion. James Cosmo, without whom it is illegal to make a historical drama set in Scotland, is, of course, in this one as well. Mackenzie’s leading man, Chris Pine, cannot be ridiculed in any way for his Scots accent, slightly disappointingly.

And because a lot of water has flowed under the Brig since Braveheart, I could now recognise, and even claim to know, a remarkable number of the performers on screen.

Also familiar are some of the voices – a few even younger than the toddler is now – to be heard singing the choral music of court and kirk scenes at the start of the movie, even if the choir itself is rarely seen.

Much has been made of the historical accuracy of the film, by comparison with Braveheart, but that is hardly worth spending any time on, although the known facts around the pre-Bannockburn Battle of Loudoun Hill, which is the culmination of Outlaw King, do seem at some remove from the script. When present-day truth has become such a flexible concept, pinning down details of conflicts seven centuries ago seems a fool’s errand.

More to the point, really, is that stripping out the brutal, gory battle scenes – which, admittedly, would make it a much shorter and less compelling film, superbly realised as they are – would leave Outlaw King, like its predecessors, looking like a beautifully shot extended VisitScotland advertisement.

If Pine seemed particularly anxious not to have his movie seen as making the case for nationalism in the current international climate, I suspect that it as much because he knows that “reality” is not what sells movies – or tourist destinations. No matter how much the new Netflix effort boosts the attractiveness of Scotland as a holiday destination, it will have to do well to match the contribution made by the fantasies of television’s Outlander and the books and films of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter.

My illustrious ancestor, King Robert, was a handsome dude who could handle himself, and he had a particularly lovely second wife and a very sweet daughter. That’s what I learned last weekend, and I’ll go along with that, because it will soon be what many folk know of that period of Scottish history.