Outlaw King - sound and fury signifying nothing

David Mackenzie’s latest film Outlaw King never tires of letting you know what it wants to be. This story of Robert the Bruce aspires to be a widescreen epic – with a capital ‘W’ and a capital ‘E’. Which makes it all the more disappointing that, funded by Netflix, its target audience is going to see it, at best on a big telly and at worst on a mobile phone.

Barry Ackroyd’s cinematography is by some distance the best thing about this otherwise unremarkable film. There are some very impressive drone shots, a handsomely-mounted night-time ambush, and some glorious tracking sequences, all of which are crying out to be seen on as big a screen as possible. But for all this visual splendour, this remains for me an uninvolving and unengaging film which is nice to look at but lacks any sense of drama or excitement.

Even the tracking shots become wearing. After a while it feels like you are watching a Visit Scotland promo or a car commercial.

Outlaw King is essentially a year in the life of Robert the Bruce (Chris Pine); the year in question being 1305 - 1306 in which Bruce presses his claim for the Scottish throne. Bruce has seized the throne by force and now wages a guerrilla campaign against Edward I (Stephen Dillane). The king sends his son, The Prince of Wales (Billy Howle) to put down the rebellion; the young prince raises the Dragon Banner meaning the rules of chivalry no longer apply, priming both sides for wholesale slaughter.

In the midst of this Bruce gets married to Elizabeth de Burgh (Florence Pugh), loses several close family members, and is generally hunted from pillar to post without showing so much as a flicker of emotion. Playing the hero as the strong, silent type may work for those brooding Pine close-ups of which Mackenzie is fond, but it does nothing to demonstrate any kind of emotional depth in the character.

None of the main characters is remotely engaging and none has any emotional arc or depth. Florence Pugh’s Elizabeth starts improbably spiky and there is the hope that she may be a strong, independent, female character but she quickly fades from the scene to the point where she spends the final third of the film suspended over a castle wall.

To be fair it’s hard really to judge how good or bad this film is. The version we see on Netflix is apparently 20 minutes shorter than the one which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival where the reviews were, to be kind, mixed. Even with 20 minutes taken out the film has serious pacing issues; it takes ages to get going and when it finally does it’s a fairly stop-start affair to the end.

Certainly the film feels poorly written with large bits of expository dialogue and no real character insights; although again we have no way of knowing what has been removed. Generally the film feels inauthentic. There is a very clever nine-minute tracking shot to open the film and, while this is technically superb, I wonder what narrative purpose it was supposed to achieve. It’s a very contemporary technique and for me it works against a 14^th century narrative.

Much will be made of the battle sequences which are brutal and bloody but relentlessly so. There’s no sense of ebb and flow in the fighting, it’s like watching the same fight four times. Also, it’s a brave director who tries to do this sort of thing in the light of Game of Thrones episodes such as Blackwater or Battle of the Bastards which set new standards for this sort of filming. There is very much a ‘been there, done that’ feel to the action here.

I have always liked the intimacy of Mackenzie’s earlier films such as Asylum (2005), Hallam Foe (2007), or even Starred Up (2013). There is a real focus on character in these films which is lacking here where instead he seems to be concentrating on some fairly pointless action.

The performances from Pine, Pugh, and Dillane seem almost perfunctory. Aaron Taylor- Johnson as Black Douglas, and Billy Howle as Edward II  on the other hand are so over the top that you wonder if they thought they were doing Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Outlaw King may find an audience on Netflix, and I hope it does, but the commercial logic of doing such a cinematic film for such a limiting platform eludes me.