
Review of â˛Outlaw Kingâ˛
At times it seems as if âOutlaw Kingâ canât quite work out what kind of film it wants to be.
Is it a film with credible characters, a plausible plot and a serious storyline? Are those long shots of Robert the Bruce wandering through overpowering Scottish landscapes perhaps a visual metaphor for the loneliness of the human condition? Or is it a cross between a medieval âSaving Private Ryanâ (lots of guts and gore and mud and blood) and a Scottish version of King Arthur (good-looking bloke teams up with woman and slays his way against overwhelming odds to become the Peopleâs King)?
Unfortunately, the film cannot the resist the temptation of the latter. The direction of travel thereafter is all downhill, but in an intensely entertaining kind of way.
Edward I prepares to dispatch his troops to crush the rebellious Scots, he seems to be wearing an England football top. His son prepares for war in a drunken revelry. Holding aloft two dead swans he pledges: âBy these swans I vow to avenge this murderous insult to God.â
Robert the Bruce, by contrast, prefers something akin to Marks and Spencer leisurewear for men (except when wearing his chainmail PPE). When he goes to war, itâs more like a Butlins weekend honeymoon. He even takes his daughter, to make it a real family affair.
Edward II (his father dies in the course of the film) is a cad, a coward, a bully, and an incompetent military commander. Even the vow which he makes to his father at his deathbed is breached within seconds of his demise.
Robert the Bruce is the exact opposite. So as not to offend her, he doesnât even have sex with his wife on their wedding night. People keep on bowing down before him, but heâll have none of that. Resilient in the face of adversity, he is a magnet for the oppressed and downtrodden. Without doubt: a King for the many, not the few.
(There is, it is true, that unfortunate incident when he murders fellow-noble John Comyn in front of a church altar. But it was a spur-of-the-moment murder. And the Church forgives him. So even thatâs okay.)
Despite the substantial cuts made to the original film, the version on release is still overly long. Even the most ardent English patriot will long for the final battle and Scottish victory, to get the film over and done with.
When the hour of battle finally lours, things donât look good for the Peopleâs King. Heâs outnumbered and out-horsed (he hasnât got any) and his wife is in a cage hanging from the walls of an English coastline castle. Things donât get much worse than that. But Robert fires up his troops with an appeal to God, honour, country, and family (and to fight like beasts). The best that Edward II can manage is a psychotic version of Project Fear.
Then there is a very bloody battle. Robert wins. Edward loses and gets booed off the battlefield. Heâs such a pathetic individual that heâs not even worth killing. And, of course, the young boy with the Toni & Guy haircut who wanders through the film with the Poundland Scottish crown concealed beneath his chainmail, is killed. His final act on earth is to hand over the crown to its rightful owner.
The film is not serious history. According to the latest research on Robert the Bruce, he was born near Chelmsford in Essex. He was ambitious rather than altruistic. And his murder of Comyn was a calculated political assassination. But this hardly matters. The film does not pretend to be serious history. And no-one ever criticised Elizabeth because Elizabeth I did not really look like Cate Blanchett (nor dress up in shiny armour and ride a white stallion along the English coast as the Spanish Armada approached).
Pro-independence fundamentalists have hailed the film as âa clarion call for independenceâ. More sensible people will probably see it as a well-made film loosely based on events which happened over seven centuries ago.
A different take: a film without a heart
Like Dale Street I rather wonder whether the âpro-independence fundamentalistsâ who have described David Mackenzieâs Outlaw King as a âclarion call for Scottish independenceâ can possibly have been watching the same film I saw. The entire endeavour, both in terms of the actual film itself and the story itâs telling, end up feeling a little... well, pointless. Chris Pine gives a measured, reserved performance as Robert the Bruce, but with the effect that his reasons for risking everything to undertake a dangerous war against the English crown seem rather inscrutable, a mystery the film never really explores.
Dale says that Robert âfires up his troops with an appeal to God, honour, country, and familyâ, but this isnât quite right. Where Mel Gibsonâs ridiculous Braveheart had William Wallace conclude his pre-battle pep talk with a bloodcurdling nationalist battlecry (âAlba gu brĂ thâ: in Gaelic no less, a language that Wallace, a minor Lowlands nobleman, may not even have spoken), Robert strikes a very different tone. What he actually says is: âWhether you fight for god, for honour, for country, for family, for yourselves, I do not care [my emphasis], as long as you fight.â Itâs hardly stirring stuff.
This could all have been turned into an interesting inquiry, which Dale himself hints at: was Robert motivated by sincere nationalist ideology, or by an entitled, power-hungry aristocratâs belief in his own right to rule, or some combination of these, or something else? However, in the context of a script that presents him as blandly sympathetic rather than complicated and multidimensional, its effect is to leave the film without any real core.
Dale is also absolutely right to query the filmâs portrayal of Robert as a âPeopleâs Kingâ. The filmâs title unavoidably evokes Robin Hood, and thereâs a good deal of âRobert and his merry menâ about the portrayal of the campaign, with much sitting around fires in the woods and much singing of ballads. But there was no ârob the rich to feed the poorâ element to the war; rather, it was a conflict between different factions of a substantially enmeshed aristocracy â the Prince of Wales, later Edward II, and Robert the Bruce are shown as childhood playmates â about who had the right to rule which territory.
Manohla Dargis, reviewing the film for the New York Times put it best, saying: âLike many movies of this type, it never engages a simple yet profound question: Why would human beings, especially the lowliest, willingly die to be ruled by a king named Robert instead of one called Edward?â
There is undoubtedly much human drama and escapist entertainment to be mined from the histories of clashes between aristocratic feudal dynasties and factions, as the world-conquering popularity of Game of Thrones attests. But, while we cannot artificially overlay contemporary political frames onto a Medieval context, it would be refreshing to hear some stories, even imagined ones, of how the âordinary peopleâ of our distant past fitted into and engaged with these events, and not just the tales of kings and would-be kings.
Daniel Randall