David Mackenzie – Movie Musings

Chris Pine leads Scottish rebellion in Netflix’s Outlaw King

Director: David Mackenzie

Cast: Chris Pine (Robert the Bruce), Aaron Taylor-Johnson (James Douglas), Florence Pugh (Elizabeth de Burgh), Stephen Dillane (Edward I), Billy Howle (Edward II), Tony Curran (Angus Macdonald), Sam Spruell (Aymer de Valence), Lorne Macfadyen (Neil Bruce), Alastair Mackenzie (Lord Atholl), James Cosmo (Robert de Bruce), Callan Mulvey (John Comyn)

In 1995 the world went crazy for Mel Gibson’s Braveheart, which turned William Wallace from a largely forgotten historical rebel into a martyr for independence. Outlaw King is an almost spiritual sequel that follows the life of Robert the Bruce, the eventual winner of Scottish independence. It picks up almost immediately from the death of Wallace and follows the struggle of the Bruce to take the throne. But I’d be surprised if it has the same impact.

Outlaw King is a fairly decent pick-up of events, and it tries to get a balance between drama and history – one it more or less manages until the final act. In the aftermath of a failed Scottish rebellion, Robert the Bruce has the advantage of his father (James Cosmo) being an old friend of Edward I (Stephen Dillane). After renewing his oath of loyalty to Edward, Robert is given land, influence and a marriage to wealthy noblewoman Elizabeth de Burgh (Florence Pugh). However, after his father dies regretting the pact and William Wallace is brutally executed by the English, Robert uses the public outrage as a boost to putting together his own claim to the Scottish throne. Murdering his chief rival in a church, he raises the flag of rebellion against the English and leads an army to take back Scotland. But things swiftly go wrong, and Bruce finds himself on the run and declared a rebel.

Outlaw King gets a lot right. It’s impressively filmed and looks fantastic. The photography by Barry Ackroyd is wonderful, in particular the use of candles for interior scenes which bring a brilliant golden glow to the action. Mackenzie is an ambitious and imaginative director, and he pushes himself to the limit here. The opening nine minutes of the film is one long continuous shot that takes in debate, a sword fight, court room intrigue and the firing of the largest trebuchet you are going to see outside of Warwick Castle. With the camera swaying and bobbing around in this sequence you have to admire the chutzpah – even if I can see that some viewers (my wife included!) might think it showing off.

Mackenzie gets equal flourish out of the film’s many combat scenes. There is, to tell the truth, probably one too many of these bloody melees, but the camera gets a real sense of the blood, mud and gore that medieval battle involved. With brilliant use of hand-held immersive camerawork, each of these battles really gives you a sense of bloo-spattered chaos. Sometimes things are hard to follow – at least one death in combat is met with fury, but I’m not entirely sure who that guy even was (and it’s never mentioned again). But you’ve got to admire the skill of the film-making.

It’s the story itself where the film sometimes falls a bit flat. It does get a really good sense of the medieval, I will certainly give it that. The design and attitudes of the film are pretty perfect, and the stakes that everyone is clashing for feel very real. But the film encounters problems more and more as the film drifts into fiction and away from history. While the realpolitik of Bruce’s move to have himself declared king has a ruthlessness that feels real, the film’s attempt to build a personal rivalry between Bruce and the future Edward II feels forced from the start. By the time the film’s conclusion attempts to boil the entire campaign for Scottish independence into a mano-a-mano clash between the two on the battlefield (that of course never actually happened) you start to feel it’s getting very silly. Not least as figures who in real life would be invaluable bargaining chips are allowed to walk free from the battle field, to demonstrate the moral superiority of our heroes.

It’s a part of the general drift of the storyline that gets a little less compelling the longer it goes on. Maybe this is because once Bruce has his initial army destroyed and his first campaign to grasp power defeated, the story of him being on the run and carrying out guerrilla hits never feels fresh and original. We’ve seen it before – and the way the film generally avoids developing the supporting characters fully often means your focus starts to shift. After a really strong start, the film becomes more and more generic, Bruce himself becomes more and more a perfect leader rather than the almost Machiavellian character he started as, and the focus turns more and more into making it a conventional goodie-vs-baddie clash. It becomes something more forgettable, more like something you’ve seen before, and turns a campaign that took almost ten years into a rushed “and then they won this battle and everything was fine” ending.

There are many strong moments in there though, not least the generally decent performances from the cast. Chris Pine as Robert the Bruce sounds like the sort of casting decision made in hell, but he actually handles himself very well. His accent is very good, he captures a lot of the complexity of Bruce as a man who wants to be good but must sometimes be ruthless, and he brings a large dollop of charisma to the role so that you never really find yourself questioning whether he is a man others would follow. He doesn’t set the world alight, but does a good job.

The film’s stand-out turn however comes from Florence Pugh, who brings her customary intelligence and charisma to the complex part of the Bruce’s wife. At first positioned into an arranged marriage, she quickly proves both her independence and value, but also her strength of character. Far from being just a hostage – the role history largely assigned her – Pugh’s performance always makes her a character with agency, a woman determined enough to be loyal to the end once she has made her choices. There are other decent performances as well, in particular from Stephen Dillane as an authoritarian hard-ass Edward I, while Billy Howle gets to a play an Edward II who feels true (the film avoids references to his homosexuality, but does allow him to be the fearsome warrior – if hopeless general – he was, as opposed to the homophobic cartoon he was in Braveheart).

Outlaw King,though, just isn’t quite good enough. It’s fine for a decent watch on a Saturday night. In fact Netflix is just about its perfect platform: if you stumbled across this while scrolling through the library, and you were in the mood to click on it, you wouldn’t be disappointed. But even though it’s visually impressive and enjoyable, it’s also increasingly predictable and even a little bit empty. It doesn’t quite come to life as much as it should and eventually settles for being something quite traditional.

Chris Pine and Ben Foster carry out a series of personally motivated bank robberies in Hell or High Water

Director: David Mackenzie

Cast: Jeff Bridges (Marcus Hamilton), Chris Pine (Toby Howard), Ben Foster (Tanner Howard), Gil Birmingham (Alberto Parker), Marin Ireland (Debbie Howard), Katy Mixon (Elsie), Kevin Rakin (Billy Rayburn)

In West Texas, two brothers – divorced father Toby Howard (Chris Pine) and his ex-con brother Tanner (Ben Foster) – carry out a series of early morning raids on branches of the Texas Midlands Bank. Their robberies are investigated by Texas Ranger Marcus Hamilton (Jeff Bridges) working his last case before retirement, and his partner Alberto Parker (Gil Birmingham). The brothers however are motivated by more than just a desire for money – and these motivations drive them to ever more desperate and dangerous actions.

Hell or High Water is a fine piece of skilled professional film-making. The story is tightly scripted, and Mackenzie’s direction marries up a modern outlook with the style of a classic John Ford western. But, for me, it reaches for a thematic richness that isn’t quite there. It’s in the same territory as No Country for Old Men but it never achieves that film’s complexity. It creates characters we care about, and the story keeps us gripped, but it lacks that certain extra dimension that profoundly moves us. It tries to tell itself (and us) that it’s a profound exploration of themes around life and death, but it never really reaches these feelings – its grasp is less than its reach.

But it’s still a hugely enjoyable and impressive movie. Mackenzie’s direction is superb, detailed and smooth, and he is able to bring to life both the drama and the action. The story has an old school heist quality, with our gangsters sort of proto-Robin Hoods, naïve enough for us to invest in their actions, but dangerous enough for us to understand why events spin outside their control. Sheridan’s script is full of punchy lines and genuine emotional weight. The plot line gets a bit bogged down in the ins and outs of the reasons why our ‘heroes’ are doing what they are doing, but there is an emotional truth to it that really works.

The film also creates a wonderful sense of Texas as a land that seems to have only just moved on from the Wild West. Everyone in the film seems to be either packing heat or wearing a Stetson (or both). Genuine cowboys guide cattle across a road. The rangers have an old school gruffness about them, staking out banks from across the road in saloon bars that don’t seem to have moved on from the days of Wyatt Earp. At the slightest sign of danger, ordinary people reach for their guns and start shooting. Everything takes place in dusty countries, or rural feeling towns. I can barely remember seeing a computer or mobile phone. The whole film feels slightly out of step with the modern world.

It also draws some very fine performances from its actors. Chris Pine may never have been better than as reluctant bank robber Toby. Toby is a classic western outsider, a man who is working to protect his family and preserve their future – often by dangerous means – but accepts that this family life he is building has no place for him in it. Pine brings the part a finely judged sadness, a sense of a man without a place in the world. Ben Foster is equally good as his firecracker brother, a damaged anarchist at heart whose love of impulsive danger will have fatal consequences.

The heart of the movie though is Jeff Bridges’ ranger, a marvellous portrait of gruff-old school machismo. Bridges invests this role throughout with a humane decency, an anger at the distress and violence. His friendship with his partner Alberto (a touching Gil Birmingham) provides much of the affectionate heart of the movie, their good natured joshing and banter a continual source of humour. Bridges’ world-weary, out-of-time quality matches perfectly with the timeless mood of the movie. It’s a beautifully judged, simple, unshowy performance.

It’s a beautifully judged combination of crime and family thriller, while its ability to balance the old-school feeling and aesthetic of West Texas with a punchy modern-feeling tale of the greed of bankers, works extremely well. It’s got a dark Butch Cassidy feeling to it, and the film’s focus is tightly kept on the four leads, allowing the audiences understanding of them to grow and develop. By the conclusion of the film, your loyalties will be firmly divided between both the law and robbers, summed up best by a beautifully played elegiac final scene, laced with regret, sadness and tension.

But despite all this, it never quite breaks out of its pulpy roots to become something else in the way that No Country for Old Men manages to do. Wonderful character study as it is, it feels like a film that wants to make a broader, spiritual comment about the American way and modern masculinity. It doesn’t quite manage to do this. I don’t feel that this film really succeeds in suggesting it is about much more than what’s on the surface.

But that doesn’t matter so much, when the surface is so strong and as well directed, acted and written as this. If Hell or High Water is, at the end of the day, just a smart cops-and-robbers story, it’s certainly one that’s full of freshness and intelligence and grips your interest from start to finish. In a world where Hollywood churns out over-promoted average films, it stands out as something far more heartfelt, expertly crafted and hugely enjoyable.