In the introduction to their TIFF opening night selection “Outlaw King,” director David Mackenzie and producer Gillian Berrie made much of its seven-year journey to the screen. That’s a long time to spend on a project, particularly one as presumably complicated and costly as this one, so one does wonder at what point it became clear that they were making a movie about the wrong character. I’ll bet it was early. It sure is for the viewer.
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Their subject is Robert the Bruce (Chris Pine), who led the Scottish people in their long, hard battle for independence from the British crown. The film’s events are confined to a comparatively short section of that battle, beginning at the end of years of fighting, as the Bruce and his men have surrendered to King Edward I (a splendidly hateful Stephen Dillane). But that harmony is clearly not long for this world, particularly when our hero is dispatched to help hunt down William Wallace (whose single scene is like some kind of winking nod to a “Braveheart” Cinematic Universe), who is summarily tortured, killed, and put on display. Before long, the Bruce has been crowned king to the Scots and outlaw to the Brits, who attempt to take him down, with little success.
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The better movie hiding inside that one concerns Elizabeth de Burgh (“Lady Macbeth” star Florence Pugh, just as magnetic here), the goddaughter of King Edward, who is set up in an arranged marriage with Robert the Bruce as an act of symbolism between the healing nations. Neither party is particularly thrilled by the accord, at first (he politely demurs from the grotesquely staged “retirement to the bedchambers on their wedding night, and she breathes a sigh of relief as he exits), but soon enough, they’re engaged in a ballet of pursuits and retreats. There’s real juice in these scenes; Pugh purrs her lines like she knows secrets she’s not telling, and Pine feeds off that wickedness.
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But no sooner has she become a willing co-conspirator with her husband than the movie tucks her away for safety (and, later, to be put in danger). Instead, we follow Bruce and his ragtag crew of survivors as they attempt to mount a revolution and engage in many, many, many battles – all of which are kind of a slog, and all of which we’ve seen before. Occasionally, we’re allowed to check back in with Pugh, whose sincerity and intelligence is like an oasis in this desert of clanging armor and spurting blood.
It would help if the rest of the performers weren’t so dull. Pine’s Scottish accent is more than a little dodgy (it comes and goes, and does both often) and it seems to derail the entire performance – he’s often just plain bad, as if he was so confounded by the dialect, he couldn’t figure anything else out either. He’s given plenty of opportunities to cast his blue eyes heavenward and sing soulful Scottish ballads for his lost love. But overall he’s a cipher, which is a shock, considering the vitality we’ve come to expect from him – there’s none of the wit of ”Wonder Woman,” the energy of “Star Trek,” or the depth of his last collaboration with Mackenzie, “Hell or High Water.”(As his right-hand man, Aaron Taylor-Johnson is similarly bland, but that’s to be expected.) Billy Howle’s wide-eyed overacting as the Prince of Wales makes for many an unintentional snicker, and his last scene is embarrassingly broad, a final humiliation more appropriate to an ‘80s slob comedy than a period adventure.
Mackenzie’s direction is a mixed bag. His camerawork is restless – in dialogue scenes, often distractingly so – but he does marshal a sense of big-screen spectacle, particularly in his wide shots of rolling landscapes and comically disproportionate battles. He blocks and shoots those action beats well; he knows where to put the camera, and how to arrange and edit for maximum jolts (there are some impressive long takes too). Yet the monotony of those sequences is undeniable. The blood sprays, the arrows fly and the horses whinny, but after a while, it’s just noise. And by the time the picture drags into the endless, ultra-gory final battle in hour three, they’ve become borderline numbing.
Overall, “Outlaw King” plays like the kind of passion project that a filmmaker just gets lost in; its bloated running time and narrative tedium bespeak a director watching a movie in his head for so long, he can no longer see its flaws. And they are considerable. But it’s still worth your time, for one reason and one reason only: Florence Pugh’s performance. It’s a good thing it’s landing on Netflix. Have that fast-forward button ready. [C-]
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