With a head and a heart in the right place, Braveheart comes off as a towering achievement of hope, love and tragedy.

Rating: 9/10 (14 December 2008)

Braveheart is a stunning film, a film that takes you on a turning and unravelling journey of hope and tragedy but never veers off into a realm of out and out escapist fantasy. It's a film that remains grounded and compelling, even with a long runtime and not for a second if we're into the film at the level I was do we ever feel it's moving too slowly. Here is a film that follows the adventures of just an everyday boy made-man and put through the grinder. He interacts with the people in his surroundings and his surroundings in general; comes to love someone; comes to hate someone else; must rediscover himself following a tragedy and the underlying theme is resilience or battling for what you believe.
I think Braveheart works on its own level because of its grounded reality and it works better than later films that were perhaps inspired by it in the form of Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven. There is a constant, grounded sense of realism in Braveheart. At its core, you could read into it as a revenge story but the idea is ambiguous due to there being no distinct enemy as to whom garner vengeance from. Indeed, any retribution the protagonist gets from killing as a result of killing is done swiftly and, in his eyes, justly shortly after the initial death happened. In many-another film, the obligatory scene of the protagonist getting his revenge from the 'bad guy' that killed someone the protagonist loved would happen ten minutes, maybe more, from the end. In Braveheart it occurs after about half an hour thus rendering the rest of the film a different beast.
The film is unlike Gladiator in this respect, which was an out and out revenge film for the death of a family. It is unlike Kingdom of Heaven which was a really poorly done and ropey journey of self discovery with a dull lead and sprawling narrative complete with racist tone. Braveheart achieves in about forty-five minutes what most of these two films (try to) accomplish in their entire runtimes. What begins and then ends as a tale of anger and payback actually escalates into a full blown story about uprising and one's right to live without oppression.
The film centres on William Wallace, played very briefly at the start by James Robinson as a child but then by co-producer and overall director Mel Gibson. Gibson plays the character with a certain innocence early on as he engages in the oppressed world in which he lives. He tries to avoid the English and their grip on the nation, going so far as to defy them and their rules by marrying childhood sweetheart Murron MacClannough (McCormack) behind everyone's back but he does so in a cheeky manner in order to try and beat the system and avoid one of the English higher-ups being allowed to 'take' the newlywed for one night. What follows is a brief diversion into another arc mentioned before the main course of the uprising.
The film carries a distinct post-modern feel. Wallace uses odd tactics to 'woo' his bride to be; methods perhaps usually seen, invented even, in the modern age. Simple things such as throwing pebbles at a window in order to arouse attention from a loved one but these romantic elements to do with love are combined with older, more traditional beliefs or 'conventions' such as proceeding to be married first, in order to share an embrace. The film actually begins with Wallace's father dying and the young Wallace at the time being sent off for 'training'; training of the body but also of the mind  to say we will get a glimpse of the results of this tantalising set up is an understatement.
Due to the film's nature of going one up on itself after it has dealt with the mini-narrative of revenge, we expect the film to get tuned up a level because of the uprising plot. Braveheart does this but it does so without resorting to mass battle scenes and cut-a-millisecond sequences that would distort the film, this could be seen as an action film but that doesn't mean we need action all the time. The film is a pot-boiler, a film that lends time to studies and other characters: the king of England nicknamed 'Longshanks' (McGoohan); a French princess named Isabelle (Marceau) and several allies within the Scottish camp. Wallace is constantly referred to as not a hero, purely because he doesn't 'look' like one with his short build and unattractive face but this is the film observing heroic clichés and going against them whilst pointing them out.
The film plays out like a game of chess, complete with battles; strategic moving around and ambushes of various different pieces armed with different weapons. Even the king himself is on the field at certain points making moves. Additionally, the parallels between young, upcoming heroes is made clear: Wallace and the future king of England are given sporadic case-studies in the sense they're both young but Wallace has nothing at his disposal and acts out of emotion chasing everything whereas the prince is young and has everything at his disposal complete with an assured future but shies away from it  the point is how they go about their lives and how much certain things mean to them, although their overall fates might extinguish the theory. Regardless, Braveheart is a big; broad and cracking epic that everyone should see.