Plunkett & MacLeane **** (1999, Robert Carlyle, Jonny Lee Miller, Ken Stott, Liv Tyler, Alan Cumming, Michael Gambon) – Classic Film Review 792

Here’s an oddity: an old-style highwayman adventure yarn with a flashy 90s new-style gloss and a welter of anachronisms on the soundtrack, with present-day street language and rock music. The flash is put on it by debut director Jake Scott, a graduate of pop videos and commercials, and son of director Ridley Scott.

Taking it properly seriously, Robert Carlyle is possibly a bit glum as real-life 18th-century English highwayman Will Plunkett, who teams up with his dandy colleague Captain James MacLeane (Jonny Lee Miller) to terrorise and rob the rich. And that’s more or less it as the setup.

They make the mistake of holding up the coach of Lord Chief Justice Gibson (Michael Gambon), and MacLeane instantly falls in love with his beautiful and cunning niece, Lady Rebecca Gibson. In this role, America’s Liv Tyler struggles with her English accent and the feeble, underwritten romantic end of what’s otherwise a boys’ own script.

Miller has a lot more fun with a much showier part, though he, too, is upstaged by Ken Stott’s lip-smackingly sadistic villain, the government’s highwayman catcher, the Thief Taker General, who also fancies Lady Rebecca.

Among the other stereotypes, Alan Cumming has most fun as Lord Rochester, the fop who, at the end of the movie, reverts to what he sees as his true vocation, of corrupting the young. Matt Lucas (Sir Oswald), David Walliams (Viscount Bilston) and Alexander Armstrong (Winterburn) are also in the cast.

The movie takes a full half-hour to get into its stride as it struggles to find the right tone and voice, but by the last half-hour it’s in splendid full-blooded form as a classic adventure yarn. Older audiences may be repelled by the youth-generation handling and younger audiences, weaned in the 90s on Trainspotting, may just not fancy the subject at all.

It’ll be a great pity if it doesn’t find its audience. And, in fact, it didn’t really on release – it took only $500,000 in the US.

It’s filmed by cinematographer John Mathieson, very attractively, on location in London, Prague and Spain.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 792

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