Rob Roy

Rob Roy can’t escape being compared with Braveheart.  They are both set in Scotland, about a famous figure from Scottish history, and they both came out in 1995.  Braveheart is a complicated film.  It is a laughably inaccurate as a piece of historical storytelling, made with modern post-enlightenment ideals of individual liberty that are totally out of place in its setting.  Also Mel Gibson clearly hates the English. Yet if you set those quibbles aside, it is very well made and an immensely fun picture; one where you barely notice its three hour run time. On the other hand, Rob Roy is a chore that feels every minute of its shorter two hour and twenty minute length.  

There are a handful of things that the film does well.  The acting is largely stellar, although the villains occasionally chew the scenery too much for my liking.  The costumes and sets are everything one could want from a sumptuous period piece. The idea behind the film is reasonably smart as well.  The filmmakers have said they were trying to make the movie feel like a spiritual cousin to late-genre Westerns like the films of Sergio Leone or John Ford’s The Searchers.  This angle is a clever take for a character who is seen as both a folk hero in Scotland and a criminal in England. Self-governing populations far from conventional society, vigilante justice, and grand folk tales about morally ambiguous murderers fit the romanticized versions of both the American west and the 18th Century highlands.  The problems all come in the execution. The film could be seen through three different lenses: as high drama, as an action adventure story, and as a character study. It fails at all three.

As a high drama, it fails to be compelling.  Basically, it’s boring. Deadly boring. Any period piece or work of fantasy has to ground the audience in its time and place, which will consume a decent chunk of the first act with world building, but the action of the story needs to still keep driving forward.  For example, in Star Wars: A New Hope, Luke doesn’t answer his call to action, often considered the point at which the first act transitions into the second, until about forty minutes into the film, when he comes home from seeing Leia’s message to discover that Imperial troops have destroyed his childhood home and killed his surrogate parents.  However, the inciting incident, the moment that drives the plot of the story forward, is Leia’s ship being attacked, which is the opening shot of the movie. In Rob Roy, the inciting incident doesn’t come until minute forty, Rob Roy MacGregor is tricked and his land is stolen from him via a conspiracy, and the action of the story doesn’t start to take off until twenty minutes later, at about an hour in, when the men of the MacGregor clan go into hiding and MacGregor’s wife is raped and his clan’s properties are destroyed.  Almost half the movie passes before the actual story begins. Even once the story gets moving, very little exciting or dramatic actually happens.

Roger Ebert called the film a “splendid, rousing historical adventure” and Netflix categorizes it in the genre of Action & Adventure and the mood Exciting.  It is none of those things. There is very little action: there are scant few fights, chase scenes, or explosive releases of narrative tension. The action beats that are there are often too short to feel exciting or get you invested.  There is very little adventure: there are virtually no amazing physical feats, acts of daring do, or exploration and discovery a la Indiana Jones or The Jewel of the Nile. There is one big fight, the culmination of the entire story, with all its dull political maneuvering and empty tension.  It is like a microcosm for the movie as a whole. It makes many laudable design choices to give it a fresh twist but ultimately is let down by the core plot and driving action. There is no music, only the sound of swords clashing, a rapier for the Englishman and a one-handed broadsword for the Scot, as is appropriate.  The fighters actually get tired. The fight is “under choreographed” in that it forgoes the swashbuckling of Errol Flynn or the acrobatics of Douglas Fairbanks for a more grounded feel. Those touches are all great. However, unlike similarly under choreographed fights, such as the raw emotionality of Luke’s confrontation with Vader in Return of the Jedi, Rob Roy’s climatic duel fails to work as a moment for powerful emotional catharsis, even robbing MacGregor of a triumphant victory.  In the conventional sense, MacGregor doesn’t win the duel. He is beaten, cut, forced to the ground, and essentially put in the position of surrender with a blade’s edge at his throat, only for him to just, you know, win. He doesn’t really trick his adversary by being clever, playing to the Englishman’s sense of superiority. He doesn’t beat him with superior stamina, which would match nicely with the exhaustion displayed during the fight. He doesn’t overwhelm him with raw strength, fueled by justified rage and righteous anger.  He does the equivalent of flying a white flag and then, while being shown mercy, drawing a gun and shooting him. As such, the approximately seven minute fight is neither a spectacle for the eyes nor a treat for the mind. I found it both anti-climatic and narratively unsatisfying.

Well if it isn’t high drama or heavy in populist pleasing action, maybe it is intended as a character study of loss and redemption.  If it is, it fails at that too. As a character study in the vein of heroes from the previously mentioned Westerns, Rob Roy MacGregor is not dynamic or interesting enough to carry the film.  He isn’t morally ambiguous like Clint Eastwood’s nameless man from The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. He isn’t nuanced like John Wayne’s character from The Searchers, feeling like a man who doesn’t belong, who’s actions won the land for civilization but also exclude him from it.  He definitely isn’t a fall from grace anti-hero like anyone in The Wild Bunch, making questionable choice after questionable choice until dying in a hail of gunfire. MacGregor is just a stand up guy out to right a wrong that was done to him. The most morally borderline thing done in the movie, killing an unarmed and restrained captive, is done by MacGregor’s wife, not MacGregor himself.  He ends the movie with his lands returned and what is left of his immediate family, and his clan, reunited. He doesn’t even really enact vengeance, bloody vengeance, as the villain he slays in the climax of the movie is part of a wager that will return his lands: a means to an end. This puts the story much more in line with the Columbia Pictures run of B-movie Westerns, where the hero is right and good and gets everything he wants at the end, than late-genre Westerns, where things are decidedly more grey.  I don’t think a movie is made better by telling one of these types of stories over the other, per se, but by going for a simple white-hat black-hat Western structure, it means giving up the complexity necessary for an entertaining character study. Rob Roy follows the simpler formula which makes MacGregor a simpler character, whose plight is sad but whose lack of inner conflicts is uninteresting fodder for a heavily character driven piece.

In my opinion, this movie is designed well and yet poorly made.  The acting is great, the costumes are a treat, and the settings are period perfect and deftly shot.  However, the overarching feel of the piece, probably most noticeable in pace and story structure, was dull.  Many claim that this film was unfairly overlooked because its release put it in direct competition with Braveheart.  Overlooked, probably. Unfairly…? While not a total turkey, Rob Roy was not a film I would say I enjoyed, either.

Would Recommend: If you like sumptuous costume dramas, regardless of quality.

Would Not Recommend: If you like good storytelling.