Outlaw King (2018)

(Netflix Streaming, December 2019) There are days when watching even a decent historical film is simply too much, and Outlaw King had the bad luck to land on such a day. I tried getting interested in this fictionalized retelling of Robert the Bruce’s history, but it just didn’t work. Grimy, realistic, dirty and unpleasant to a fault, this is a film thanks spends quite a bit of time setting up and then showing medieval-era battles … which end up being somewhat anachronic. Chris Pine is not bad in the least role, but the film around him is heavy to the point of choking almost any vitality out of it. Normally, I’d float the idea of a re-watch sometime in the future, but my interest in such a thing is roughly negative at this point, especially considering the two-and-a-half-hour length of the result. There’s little in Outlaw King that breaks out of the generic brown-and-blue feeling of similar historical epics, even if you’re in a better mood.