“You could fight for God, or country, or family. I do not care, so long as you fight!”
Chris Pine is beautiful. With big blue eyes, a fit body, and sculpted lips, he can emote, when necessary, and he can move through required action choreography, which is the necessary step, it seems, of big budgeted movie stardom today.[1] He’s enjoyed considerable success, due to luck and role selection, but his gene pool is strong, too. His father, Robert Pine, an actor, got his big break on TV’s CHiPs (1977-1983), and his mother, Gloria Gwynne, worked as an actress for almost 20 years. Meaning: the kid’s got looks to spare, and he can brood.
This ability to brood severely, as Pine does in Outlaw King (David Mackenzie, 2018), a Netflix-distributed, historical costume drama, sees him withholding emotion in favor of reacting to often-quite-provocative story world activity. The choice to say little and concentrate, instead, on unpleasantness while playing Robert the Bruce, a keystone to Scottish national identity, holds the screen, sort of, but Pine, despite his physical charisma, is mostly a cipher; one more affectless hunk with a sword and a lady to save.
Fortunately, the movie’s director, David Mackenzie, best known for Hell or High Water (2016), moves through this very busy story of deception and bloodshed, war and retreat, and he spends little time worrying over whether Robert’s peculiar ascendance to the Scottish crown is adequate to demands of anchoring a movie. In short, it is not; but it is of little consequence, really, because the Outlaw King satisfies a certain kind of moviegoer entirely through spectacle.
Outlets have reported the movie’s budget as $120 million. Without a saturation release in theatrical markets, indeed only a debut at the Toronto International Film Festival with mixed reviews, Oulaw King’s production companies must have bet the farm and lost it, only to settle for the hope of a really good turn-out in streaming viewers on Netflix. That this will prove to be an astounding financial loss seems, to this viewer, certain. On the upside, Mackenzie is able to generate considerable wonder at the scale of his production.
As one example, the opening scene is set in 1304 beneath Stirling Castle. Edward I of England (Stephen Dillane) is laying siege and addresses himself to an assembled group of once-rebellious Scottish lords, including Robert, whom he’s brought to heel. The camera moves through the humiliation of once proud men, through a sparring match between Robert and Edward II (Billy Howles), back to the King’s tent for more statecraft, and then out the back of the King’s encampment where he launches a trebuchet of fire at the Castle. All of this is captured in a single take, all those costumed people, all that activity, so much choreography and lighting, sound recording, and story-telling, all to express the scale of this action story, which very few of us will ever see on anything larger than a 50-inch TV.
A pity.
–December 31, 2018
[1] See his work in Star Trek (J.J. Abrams ,2009), Into the Woods (Rob Marshall, 2012), and Wonder Woman (Patty Jenkins, 2017), to pull three movie titles from among many in his filmography.
