‘Outlaw King’ is a badly written mess
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‘Outlaw King’. and Billy Howle. two sat down in London to talk about it, Pine acknowledges he had some issues with the script but that they quickly found common ground in the desire to make a film not overwhelmed by Scottish nationalism but about, as Pine says, “a rich man who decides to throw it all away to do something selfless.”
“I mean, I pretty much wanted to do it the moment he said ‘historical epic,’” Pine adds.
Pine, with his shining blue eyes and a filmography littered with blockbusters, might not be the first actor one would think of for a bloodied, mud-caked Robert the Bruce. But Mackenzie saw something of Bruce in Pine’s desperate bank robber in Hell or High Water, a performance that seemed to unlock Pine’s full power as a movie star.
“There’s something about both characters: people struggling, people dealing with uncertainty and not sure whether or not to act,” Mackenzie says. “One thing Chris brings brilliantly to the work he does is the capacity to handle that uncertainty and a character who’s working his way through things.”
After Outlaw King premiered to largely poor reviews in Toronto, Mackenzie cut | Actor about 20 minutes from the film, which he had rushed to ready for opening night at Tiff. The 52-year-old filmmaker co-wrote and produced the film, which follows a pair of acclaimed releases from the director — the father-son prison drama Starred Up and Hell or High Water — that likewise analysed masculinity.
“It needs to be deconstructed, doesn’t it?” Mackenzie says. “At this point in time, it feels like masculinity is coming under a lot of questions and it seems appropriate, as males, to be dealing with the subject of masculinity, try to find some nuance in there, try not to demonise or heroise.”
In the 65-day shoot in Scotland, Mackenzie and Pine hoped to recapture some of the freewheeling spirit of their quicker, lower-budget production in West Texas. That Bruce was a contemporary of William Wallace has led to frequent comparisons to Mel Gibson’s Braveheart, though Pine says they were seeking to make a very different sort of Scottish epic.
“How do you make the anti-Braveheart? How do you make the movie that hits all the tropes of the genre without — and I say this with all due respect — being manipulative?” Pine says.
Pine saw Bruce “nebulous” and “opaque” — someone who could be politician and warrior, hero and coward. “You cannot pin the guy down,” he says.
Before departing to shake off the day’s questions, Pine repeatedly mentioned Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind as a source of inspiration.
“To me, the primal aspects of the film are almost like men and women of the mud and of the dirt. It’s almost like you see them in this amoebic form. The earth that we come from,” says Pine. “We as humans are these dualistic creatures. We’re both aggressive and pacifist. We are feminine and masculine.” David Eustace
Set in early 14th-century Scotland, Outlaw King could be described as a spinoff of Braveheart, the stirring historical epic about Scottish rebel William Wallace that cleaned up at the 1996 Oscars, winning statuettes for best picture, best director (for Mel Gibson) and best cinematography.
It could be described that way because the character of Wallace, who is in hiding when Outlaw King begins, makes a brief appearance in the new film, which tells the story of Wallace’s contemporary, Robert the Bruce, played by Chris Pine beneath a salt-and-pepper beard and an unflattering mullet. Technically, only a part of Wallace shows up here, after he has been captured by the English and drawn and quartered for his disloyalty to the crown. It’s one arm and part of his chest, a grisly warning of more violence to come in this bloody — and bloody awful — historical epic that reunites Pine with his Hell and High Water director David Mackenzie.
This tedious slog through the highland muck should win no Oscars, only groans and raspberries. Even the much-buzzed-about glimpse of Pine, as his character emerges from a lake, doesn’t make this worth watching.
Robert picks up the mantle of rebellion against the British monarch King Edward I (Stephen Dillane) and his cruel son (Billy Howle). Reacting to oppressive taxation, the forced conscription of young Scottish men and the imprisonment of his young bride (a fiery Florence Pugh), Robert takes up arms against England as he slowly recruits other Scottish noblemen to the cause of guerrilla warfare.
The film culminates in the 1307 Battle of Loudoun Hill, which was a turning point in the struggle for Scottish independence. In the context of Outlaw King, the overlong, overly violent and chaotic scene delivers another form of liberation: ours, from a movie that is a predictable, monotonous and badly written mess.
It’s almost refreshing when the wife of a Scottish rebel greets her husband, upon his return from the resistance, with this anachronisticsounding greeting: “Where the [expletive] have you been?”
If nothing else, the question is good for an unexpected laugh, which is more than can be said for the rest of this otherwise emotion-free saga.
“We as humans are these dualistic creatures. We’re both aggressive and pacifist. We are feminine and masculine.”