Hilariously bad 🤣
I say this as both a Braveheart fan and as someone who does not roll their eyes at patriotic movies, and even thinks we need more of them. This film is atrocious.
None of the characters feel real, they’re all utterly one-dimensional, especially Issac’s cartoon villain. This has less sophistication than your average children’s film.
Gibson’s ultra wholesome rural family, his squeaky clean love interest, the happy black slave who saves a racist Southerner, the cackling English villains. The story is just a ticker-tape of entirely predictable clichés. Nothing rings true.
Gibson running with the flag at the end in slow motion 🤣
The only things that made this 3-hour slog just about bearable were:
Gibson’s natural movie-star charm.
The initial woodland rescue mission where Gibbo shoots and hacks though 20 ‘baddies’.
Tom Wilkinson’s Cornwallis, who almost stretched to having 2 dimensions.
Their scene in which Gib dupes Wilko into freeing his men.
The balls to kill off two of Gib’s sons and burn a church full of villagers.
Cannonballs graphically taking out heads and limbs.
That’s about it.
What makes everything worse is that this is ostensibly a ‘historical epic’ when it’s really just revenge porn cynically wrapped in the flag to maximise the hand-on-heart dollar.
They basically just got Roland ‘worst director ever’ Emerich to remake Braveheart, dumb and water it down, pander explicitly to flag-wavers, and judging by the rating it worked like a charm.