Taglines: Honor made him a man. Courage made him a hero. History made him a Legend.
Rob Roy movie storyline. The story of the early 18th-century Scottish outlaw Rob Roy MacGregor is presented in this epic that was beautifully photographed in the wild Scottish Highlands. Rob Roy began as a simple cattleman and sometime thief who worked hard to support his beloved wife and two sons.
His benefactor was the Marquis of Montrose from whom he borrowed a large sum with which to buy more cattle. Things go well until Montrose’s wicked hired hands Killearn and Cunningham end up killing Rob Roy’s close friend McDonald and stealing the loan money. No longer able to pay the debt, Roy heads for the hills. Meanwhile Cunningham orders that Roy’s farm be pillaged and his wife raped. Hearing of this, Rob Roy begins to fight back and a legend is born.
Rob Roy is a 1995 American adventure film directed by Michael Caton-Jones. Liam Neeson stars as Rob Roy MacGregor, an 18th-century Scottish clan chief who battles with an unscrupulous nobleman in the Scottish Highlands. Jessica Lange, John Hurt, Tim Roth, Eric Stoltz, Brian Cox, and Jason Flemyng also star. Roth won the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of the treacherous aristocrat Archibald Cunningham.
Film Review for Rob Roy
Honest clansmen and corrupt aristocrats lock horns across the windswept Scottish terrain during “Rob Roy,” but for now let’s talk about kilts. Liam Neeson, sporting the tartan of the MacGregors, swaggers so nobly and manfully across the landscape that he shows off the kilt as the legitimate power suit of the Highlands. While ushering in a spring fashion trendlet that will also feature Mel Gibson (whose “Braveheart” is on the horizon), Mr. Neeson brings to mind another Mel. It’s Brooks, and he’s out of luck: at least “Rob Roy” is no “Men in Tights” in the making.
Instead, “Rob Roy” gives Mr. Neeson his first cinematic opportunity to show off the robust physicality that made his performance on stage in “Anna Christie” such a sensation. Along with the presence of Jessica Lange, who plays the sauciest mate in all Scotland, that charisma partly compensates for long, dry stretches of “Rob Roy” and a plot too ponderous and uninteresting for the film’s visual sweep. So “Rob Roy” is best watched for local color and for its hearty, hot-blooded stars. Speaking of which, Ms. Lange may be the screen’s first actress to slide her hand under the kilt of a leading man.
“You know how fine ye are to me, Robert MacGregor?” asks Mary (Ms. Lange), showing off the lilting dialogue that is one of the film’s incidental charms. After a Brooks-worthy prologue during which the MacGregor men scare off snaggle-toothed livestock thieves, “Rob Roy” settles in for a rosy section that highlights such domestic bliss. The MacGregors are presented as simple country clansmen who extol honor, pay their debts in rabbits, dance jigs and roast their dinner on open fires. There’s time for Rob and Mary to make love on a hilltop, and for Mr. Neeson to visit the local Loch and generate a discreet skinny-dipping scene.
All this is a far cry from the dour-looking Scottish drover who was the real Rob Roy, immortalized by Sir Walter Scott in a dense, dialect-heavy volume that makes the movie look effervescent by comparison. A legend in his own land, with a nickname referring to his red hair, Rob Roy became an outlaw after failing to repay his debt to the Marquis of Montrose.
He was celebrated for his bravado and his heroics in eluding capture. But the film doesn’t convey much sense of why he should matter to modern viewers, who may know less about Rob Roy the folk hero than Rob Roy the drink. Which is why it’s handy that Mr. Neeson strides so impressively, acts so forcefully and towers over every other man in sight.
As directed by Michael Caton-Jones, whose diverse earlier films (“Doc Hollywood,” “Scandal,” “Memphis Belle,” “This Boy’s Life”) have virtually no links to this one, “Rob Roy” seems to have envisioned its villains with Mr. Neeson’s imposing machismo in mind. They are small, fussy and fey, and when all three of them confront Rob Roy in a formal garden, he’s a head taller than everyone. Unlike his adversaries, he also has the good grace not to be wearing a curled wig or (in one case) baby-blue breeches.
Wickedest among the heavies is Cunningham, played by Tim Roth as a coy, insinuating fop who doubles as both courtier to the Marquis of Montrose (John Hurt) and a surreptitious wench-chaser. “Love is a dunghill, Betty, and I am but a cock that climbs upon it to crow,” he informs one such conquest.
The film tries its hardest to lend a lusty, sometimes scatological edge to such goings-on, which means the audience is treated to a scene featuring Cunningham and his chamber-pot. And Mr. Roth (last seen, worlds away, as the stick-up man in “Pulp Fiction”) does his malevolent best with this role, even if the film relies too heavily on him to provide some personality. Whether flirting slyly with Montrose or showing off his skills as a rapist and assassin, Mr. Roth’s Cunningham does succeed in galvanizing the audience. Prissy costumes show off his savagery to nicely perverse effect.
With Mr. Hurt properly regal and wise beneath his tricornered hat, and Brian Cox delicately sinister as one of his henchmen, “Rob Roy” is poised for a battle of wills between pampered nobility and a ruffian folk hero. But Mr. Caton-Jones and Alan Sharp, who wrote the screenplay, let some of the film’s biggest confrontations go slack. The film’s final confrontation, a sword fight, starts out suspensefully and then just falls flat. And a sequence showing the ambush of one of Rob Roy’s men is too fancily intercut with another scene. (The victim is Eric Stoltz, who seems to have been cast here solely on the basis of native diffidence and red hair.)
One of the story’s strongest scenes finds Cunningham attacking Mary MacGregor, arriving by boat at her cottage in an outfit worthy of Captain Hook. So vicious that he punches, drags and then rapes her with perfect indifference, Mr. Roth gives the sequence all the nastiness it requires. And Ms. Lange, who has occasional dazzling moments here, displays great dignity mixed with raw, barely contained emotion. It’s a scene that calls for cowboy justice, for the loner who avenges affronts and defends his loved ones’ honor. Rob Roy, too often lost amid this sprawling epic, makes most sense as a cowboy hero. Kilt and all.
Rob Roy (1995)
Directed by: Michael Caton-Jones
Starring: Liam Neeson, Jessica Lange, John Hurt, Tim Roth, Eric Stoltz, Brian Cox, Andrew Keir, Brian McCardie, Jason Flemyng, Ewan Stewart, Brian McArthur
Screenplay by: Alan Sharp
Production Design by: Assheton Gorton
Cinematography by: Karl Walter Lindenlaub
Film Editing by: Peter Honess
Costume Design by: Sandy Powell
Set Decoration by: Ann Mollo
Art Direction by: John Ralph, Alan Tomkins
Music by: Carter Burwell
MPAA Rating: R for violence and sexuality.
Distributed by: Metro Goldwyn Mayer
Release Date: April 14, 1995
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