Review: Rob Roy (1995) · 2:04am Jul 27th, 2015
Dear lord above on the glen this film is bad.
1995's Rob Roy is a sluggish, two and a half hour bore fest that drags itself along, driven by a horrifically idiotic and badly put together plot, and acting that, with the exception of John Hurt and Tim Roth, is monotonous and bland.
The direction has no life, with Michael Caton-Jones barely moving his camera, and when coupled with Karl Walter Lindenlaub's uninspired cinematography means the film has no visual spark to help you through the mind numbingly awful screenplay, which is almost an indecipherable soup of early 18th century slang and euphemisms, along with a borderline stomach churning obsession with sex. Nearly every single line of conversation, if its not indecipherable plot exposition, is some sort of sexual boast or snipe, and its honestly rather disturbing to hear.
Liam Neeson is sadly unable to bring anything to the film. I've realized that, overall, Neeson is an actor of a limited range. Within his range, he can really act (just see Schindler's List), but outside of it, he's unable to surpass the material, and unlike Roth and Hurt (whom I'll touch on in a moment), he isn't self aware enough to have fun in the role. It doesn't help that his character's single minded, selfish obsession with 'honor' (a vaguely defined entity that makes minimal sense) brings literal fire and rape upon his family and his clan. Here, every single bad thing that happens to him comes from the fact that he's too self absorbed to pay a £1000 bill he owes to John Hurt. That's right. This film's main conflict is that of an unpaid loan. Nothing else.
Jessica Lange is here, but a total non entity, and feels oddly out of place. She serves no great purpose to the plot, beyond getting raped by Tim Roth and providing Neeson an excuse to kill him. That's it. Her and Neeson don't really mesh as a couple either, and I don't know what they see for each other.
Tim Roth (who gained an Oscar nom for his work here) and John Hurt, however, both ham it up, seemingly trying to out ham each other as the almost comically fopish Englishmen who may or may not, be father and son. Roth himself is having the most fun, chewing the scenery with abandon, and even when he does terrible things, his pure ham and cheese powering him through the scenes.
The rest of the film is just a bore though. Carter Burwell produces a passable score that feels like a cover band version of James Horner's vastly superior Braveheart score (which came out the same year ironically). In fact, in many ways, this film feels like a lame rip-off of Braveheart. It takes place in Scotland, features a lone man facing against the English oppressor, and the whole 'my family is brutally wronged by Englishmen' thing to.
Except Braveheart was a good movie. This isn't.
I'm giving it 1 star, almost exclusively for Hurt and Roth, who aren't even taking the film seriously.