The Highlands Chainsaw Massacre

Rating: 9/10 (25 September 2002)

"Braveheart" is overlong, overripe, and overwrought, frequently crossing the line between the dramatic and the melodramatic. We're an hour into the movie before the butt-kicking starts in earnest; up to that point there's entirely too much footage of William Wallace (Mel Gibson, who directed) and his lady-love making goo-goo eyes at each other. Still, while this nearly-three-hour saga could have used some tightening up, I wouldn't want to see it pruned to much less than 2 1/2 hours long: there IS a lot of story here, and some wonderful characters, and I like it when a long story takes its time to unfold. It's mainly the first hour that drags, after which the movie actually gets better as it goes along--a rare occurrence.

As history, the story mixes in fill-in-the-blanks fiction with what little is known about Wallace the man. We know Wallace was real--realer than Robin Hood and probably realer than King Arthur--but there's much we don't know about him. We know he won the Battle of Stirling Bridge against the English, and that he was ultimately executed for treason. Upon these bare bones is built a feast of red meat, well-researched in its depictions of medieval squalor, and unblinking in its smashing, horrendous, blood-spattered battle scenes.
Other than the movie's uneven pace, I had only a few quibbles, mostly about the liberties taken with historical fact. For instance, it omits the bridge from the Battle of Stirling Bridge, which is like omitting the harbor from the attack on Pearl Harbor. At the time of that battle (1297), the French princess (played by dishy Sophie Marceau) was only 4 or 5 years old. Nor did she marry the prince until after he had become king, i.e., after Longshanks' death. The film implies that Longshanks dies on the day of Wallace's execution; in fact, he died several years later... and was on his way back to Scotland, to stir up more trouble, at the time.

Finally--or firstly--that silly title! There's no such word as "braveheart" in English (a language the Scots have never fully mastered). Granted, the average history-illiterate American moviegoer (in this land where entirely too many people have been convinced that Cleopatra was black and can't tell you who the American Revolution was fought against) wouldn't have known who Wallace was, so putting his name in the title wouldn't have helped. So how about something like "The Highlands Chainsaw Massacre"? Or "Dead Men DO Wear Plaid"? Or "Mad Macs"? Or--taking a cue from the image of Hamish defiantly hurling Wallace's sword into the air--"1301: A Scots Odyssey"?