Long-winded; simple-minded; ultimately disturbing.

Rating: 3/10 (14 November 2004)

I had liked Mel Gibson's *Braveheart* a bit better 9 years ago when I first saw it; but that was 9 years ago. 9 more years of experience in both life and movie-watching has revealed to me this film's inadequacies upon a re-viewing on a TV broadcast.
Gibson shows no particular talent for framing, camera placement or camera movement. Blocky, centered compositions dominate. Like all amateur directors, Gibson relies on slow-motion to increase the significance or suspense of a scene. There's one particularly egregious sequence in which Gibson's Wallace, returning to a village in which he attacked some English soldiers, SLOWLY approaches some infantry who are ready to take him into custody. One soldier's chain-mailed hand SLOWLY takes hold of the harness of Gibson's horse. Gibson SLOWLY raises his arms above his head. Gibson SLOWLY reaches behind his back for his weapon. Gibson SLOWLY bashes the soldier's head in with the weapon. Look -- this is really incompetent film-making. A good director, in order to increase suspense, would find NARRATIVE solutions to achieve his aim, rather than simply assume that slowing the film's speed to a crawl will put us on the edge of our seats. Slow motion: the hallmark of lazy, unimaginative, and incompetent film-making. *Braveheart* is riddled with it, to the point that the entire film seems to consist of it. Run the film at normal speed, and the movie's no more than 2 hours long . . . and it would also become abundantly clear that there's not much to this simple-minded epic, after all.
There's certainly very little complexity here, an unforgivable sin, in my opinion, for a historical epic. We're given to understand that King Edward the First feels that he needs to subjugate Scotland in order to create a united "Greater Britain" against the competing imperial aims of England's Continental neighbors (particularly France), but why make such a comically satanic figure out of this character? "My greatness will be better demonstrated when Scotland lies in ashes," Patrick McGoohan hisses -- all that's missing is the villainous chortle. McGoohan functions as a sort of Evil Stepfather in this castle-and-moat fairy tale. It works both ways, as well: because the English are such slave-masters, any and all terrorist tactics against them by Wallace's army of Highlanders is meant to be applauded. They burn forts, slit throats, lay siege to York ("When we invaded York, you would not support us," Wallace reprimands a council of Scot nobles), send the head of York's commander, via a basket, to London, trap English soldiers in a wooden hut and burn them alive . . . all for "freedom". Gibson and screenwriter Randall Wallace (no relation to the subject of the film, presumably) manage to find nothing contradictory about all of this. Acts of murder are Bad when the English commit them, Good when the Scots commit them. However, perhaps unconsciously realizing the murkiness of this type of morality, they give Wallace an added motivation designed to checkmate those who question if murder is washed clean by patriotism: the English brutally execute Wallace's wife (married to him secretly in order to avoid Longshanks' proclamation of "prima noctis") on a trumped-up insurrection charge. Therefore, Wallace's butchery is sanctioned by a divine sense of retribution above the laws of men. One unforgivable act makes a thousand revenges forgivable. Such ontological morality is as easy as it is totally insane.
It's not Christian, either -- but Gibson has demonstrated with his most recent film, *The Passion of the Christ*, a religiosity that's not merely misguided, but mired in ignorance and neuroses. He conflates his own masochistic impulses with that of Christianity itself. In *Braveheart*, we get a foreshadowing of his *Passion* in the sequence in which he's tied to a wooded cross and tortured. (Though the cross is laid out horizontally, we get the heavy-handed point.) In Gibson's theology, spiritual transcendence is achieved when your body is getting cut open. "FREEDOM" is the triumphant battle-cry after your entrails are piled in a steaming heap. Only through pain suffered in its extreme can true victory, and therefore happiness and peace, be found. Watching one man's pathologies play out in such a public manner -- e.g., a major motion picture -- is a merely pathetic spectacle; more alarming than that is the ecstatic response this sort of thing has received from the movie-going public. Both *Braveheart* and *The Passion* were big box-office hits.
Well, the battle scenes are still pretty exciting, and have been justly imitated over the past decade. For that reason, and that reason alone, *Braveheart* earns a generous 3 stars out of 10.