"Ye must've made quite an imprassion ---"

Rating: 9/10 (22 November 2002)

Mel Gibson understood something really simple when he successfully directed the 1995 epic, "Braveheart", that subsequent directors of Randall Wallace stories did not, and that is how to capture and really transfer to the audience that visceral feeling of satisfying revenge through physical vengeance. Every time some villain gets his in this film, we feel it. We also feel the pain and the injustice of William Wallace's world. This is why the movie is a powerful story.
To be sure, look at other films with similar ingredients of high quality. Watch movies with poignant ethnic-themed scores. Watch movies with unparalleled action and battle scenes. Watch movies with heartbreaking love stories. Rarely do they get it ALL right. But "Braveheart" does, and it does so gloriously.
The movie also has really BIG flaws, the least of which is that it seems to take a LONG time to get to the point, that being the ending. Historians cringe when they consider "Braveheart" because of all of the liberties it takes with historical fact. And the death scene of Wallace becomes inadvertently corny by the very end. ("The prisoner wishes to say something. Quick bring the megaphone! All right, Mr. I-am-loopier-than-a-bowl-of-Froot-Loops, what have you got to say?" The hero tosses his head back and forth before uttering the "unexpected" cry: "FREEDOM!")
But minor flaws like those cannot diminish the previous two and a half hours of epic score, grim battles, painfully realized love, ironic humor, betrayals, victories and heartbreaks. And most of all, you do not doubt Wallace's words: "All men die. Not every man lives." In many ways, this film is "Spartacus" for the 1990's.