With it's grittier direction and more personal story, this period swashbuckler seems to lack the Hollywood gloss of it's contemporary Braveheart, but scratch the surface and you'll find the usual foreign actors with suspect accents, penny whistles and noble savages fighting the oppression of evil aristocrats, hung on a plot that could easily have been lifted directly from a western. It is however well written and solidly performed, but it is really the cast of cads that Neeson is forced into battling that make this film. John Hurt's arrogant and calculating Montrose, Brian Cox and his amusingly snide commentary on the proceedings, but most of all Tim Roth's hilariously immoral fop. It may not have the spectacle and humour of Mel Gibson's epic, but it is different enough to make it worth a... |
Rating of
2.5/4 |
