Outlaw King dir. by David Mackenzie (review)

Amid a cinematic buffet dominated by high-octane star-vehicles or superhero franchises, David Mackenzie's Netflix release of a medieval epic offers something tantalizingly different both in terms of its content and its distribution platform. It is a film whose distribution marks it out as something smaller, something leaner (the Netflix release cuts almost half an hour from the original festival version), but nevertheless expensive. It is also a film that consciously, perhaps for some of those reasons, strives to justify itself both within the traditional historical epic and as one which sits apart from it, self-consciously brooding at the edges of the history familiar from other cinematic spectacles.

Indeed, Outlaw King feels as though it is a film made of two parts: one is epic; the other, much less so. Its place within the tradition of the historical epic is assured by a series of deft and very capable set pieces. For interior locations, a static camera sits centrally amid a colorful, symmetrical pageant, while the center of the screen marks history's protagonists engaged in a solemn and epoch-making ceremony. In terms of costuming, location shots, and extras, in these scenes which dominate the first half of the film, it is clear that Netflix has taken to heart the old studio maxim of putting the money on the screen. Likewise, the use of drone-mounted cameras is in evidence throughout the exterior scenes to allow for a brand of cinematography that is now synonymous with the modern epics from Fuqua's King Arthur (2004) to Snyder's 300 (2006), wherein the characters find themselves dwarfed by their environs.

However, outside of these set pieces, the film adopts an altogether different, more personal cinematography. In the second half of the film, the narrative adopts a neat mirroring that pits the younger, now fatherless, Robert the Bruce against the ruthless Edward, Prince of Wales (himself on a quest to prove his worth to his own aged father), in a second generation tension between 'frenemies.'

The plot itself is, it must be said, relatively uneventful, as epics go. The film begins, in terms of its historical span, where Braveheart leaves off, with the quashed Scottish rebellion prefiguring the opening scene of allegiance-pledging. Wallace is dead—indeed, his dismembered remains make a grizzly cameo in an early part of the film—and the ill-fated rebels are defeated. Former claims to the Scottish throne are set aside in Edward I's self-imposed stewardship of the country. Peace is, as the unsteady camerawork and tight close-ups of the reluctant vassals make clear, uneasy and unwelcome—its fragility already signaled by malevolent glances between aggrieved parties during the ceremony that opens the film. In fact, most of the political intrigue of the film is laid out within its first fifteen minutes. The rapid succession of political changes sets up a narrative that focuses on the tension between honor and loyalty. In a second deft moment of parallel storylines, Robert's growing affection and intimacy with his wife Elizabeth is played in opposition to his increasingly fractious ties with foreign nobles. The marital harmony between noble families is thus placed in opposition to the martial rebellion of the Scots. The death of the elder Bruce is followed by revolt, and Bruce's coronation as King of Scotland (again in rapid succession) is followed quickly by a series of deliberately anticlimactic military and strategic defeats. The rest of the film works as a typical David and Goliath plot device, in which Hollywood once again leads us to favor the underdog, though Mackenzie avoids jingoism by unflinchingly depicting the unsavory and unglamorous carnage on both sides. The plot culminates in a vicious, gruesome, and (literally) visceral battle at Loudon Hill that becomes the film's finale, but which resolves little, as attested by the choice to end the film here rather than, say, after the vindicating rebellion of Edward II's own nobles against him, or the Treaty of Edinburgh...