Outlaw/ King ** (2018, Chris Pine, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Florence Pugh) – Movie Review

Chris Pine of Los Angeles, California, USA, channels his inner Scot as the 14th Century Scottish Outlaw/ King Robert the Bruce, who makes a reasonable claim to the Scottish throne and then desperately tries to unite the battle-weary and divided Scots to attempt to defeat the invading English army.

Director David Mackenzie goes for gritty realism in his biographical action drama Outlaw/ King, so the battle scenes are tough and bloody, especially the climactic sequence. That unfortunately makes it rather less entertaining than this kind of historical adventure would have been in the old days. It is all very grim and violent, actually. But there is a bit of a love story to sweeten the pill. Florence Pugh (from Oxford) turns up as Elizabeth de Burgh, who takes a liking to Robert the Bruce, and he to her, so they get married, and have a child, but are separated by the fighting, and Elizabeth is seized by the dastardly English.

Pine’s ancestry is Russian Jewish, English, German, Welsh, and French, everything except Scottish apparently. No matter, he looks right, nice and tortured, brave and heroic, a living portrait of it. Billy Howle overdoes it as the evil, merciless, murderous English Prince of Wales and so does Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Robert the Bruce’s loyal James Douglas, though they are both quite entertaining. James Cosmo, a real Scot (and in Braveheart), does well as Pine’s earnest dad Sir Robert VI de Brus, Stephen Dillane is good (though none too kingly) as English King Edward I, and Tony Curran scores as Angus Macdonald.

Outlaw/ King looks very costly and quite remarkable. Amazingly, it is all filmed in the wilds of Scotland, and it is beautifully shot by cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, with astonishing production design by Donald Graham Burt, as well as brilliant GCI. An awful lot of effort and imagination has gone into it, but the result is not the sum of everybody’s herculean efforts. It ends up rather small and cramped as a story and movie experience, even though it looks spectacular, unable to make a total, full-on claim to the movie scene as son of Braveheart, even though its hero makes a reasonable claim to the Scottish throne and the heroine.

Those looking for a jolly night out should be aware of sequences of brutal war violence, some sexuality, strong language and brief nudity. The swearing is a script deficiency, among a few wobbles that could have been ironed out easily, though most of it flows quite fluently.

The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in Canada on 6 September 2018. After the screening, the director decided to cut 20 minutes from the film, so it now runs 117 minutes. Is this why the much needed epic feel evades it?

It reunites director Mackenzie with his Hell or High Water (2016) star Chris Pine.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

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