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 14th
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.
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