Essay: The manly ridiculousness of 'Braveheart'

Freedom!

Sep 02, 2025

Dudes have been randomly screaming “freedom!” in a bad Scottish brogue ever since the blockbuster Braveheart came out in 1995. I’ve heard that single word shouted in bars and at ballgames and between friends, a revered callback to a movie that all American men seem to love, except for me, and that’s mainly because I had never seen it until a few weeks ago.

This news came as a surprise to many of my friends. “I can’t believe it,” one said. "What the fuck," said another, as if I had betrayed him—and the Brotherhood of Man. The arc of one dude’s reaction started with pity and then ended with excitement once he realized we’d be able to talk about Braveheart.

I don’t know how to break the news to him. My review of Braveheart is, you know, what’s the word that describes grabbing an invisible floating banana and then slowly masturbating it in the air?

This movie is ridiculous, even by 1990s blockbuster standards. What were those standards?

Kevin Costner’s Waterworld also came out in 1995, the priciest movie ever made at the time, a sci-fi epic that asked the question: What if Aquaman was Mad Max? It was a flop, but it's positively nuanced compared to [clears throat] "Freedom!"

Braveheart is essentially Renaissance Faire: The Movie. Rated ‘R,’ of course. It has the cinematic ambitions of a made-for-TV movie and the emotional intelligence of a frat party. And it won five Oscars. Five! Including Best Picture and Best Director, for its megastar, Mel Gibson, who originated the role of Mad Max.

I thought I’d have more, or more profound, thoughts about Braveheart, but I don’t. I get why dudes love it. It’s about cool bros swearing their loyalty to other cool bros, and then stabbing evil assholes. There are two women in Braveheart, and they have one thing in common: they are hypnotized by Mel Gibson’s character’s manhood. One of them commits treason because of it! The main villain is the King of England, who is a sneering bastard with an incompetent gay son. More on those two in a moment.

The only scenes I liked were the gory battles, but even those lose their charm after the third fake limb lopped off by a prop sword. Don’t get me wrong, I love arterial spray as much as the next guy. And maybe if Braveheart had been nothing but dudes in fabulous, filthy costumes swinging axes and morning stars, I’d have liked the movie more. But I didn’t. It’s bad history. It’s bad writing, too — Shakespeare-for-Dummies — and should have been titled MacGrunt.

The ideal age to watch a movie like Braveheart is 21 years old, which is how old I was when director and star Mel Gibson’s historical epic about 13th-century Scottish freedom fighter William Wallace became an Academy Award-winning sensation.

When I was 21, I was content to sit in a dilapidated flophouse on a crumbling street in Richmond, Virginia, watching a VHS tape of Natural Born Killers over and over again while I picked the seeds out of large piles of marijuana and it may shock younger folks to learn that in 1995, there were only two kinds of weed: the sticky green kind that the rich kids had and the dirt I was smoking. Anyway, I was busy back then.

I don’t want to come off as a snob in my old age. I did enjoy the scene in Braveheart where the actor who played the original Thenardier in the London production of Les Misérables gets his entire face smashed in by Wallace, which is pretty gross and, therefore, awesome. But it’s just one moment, really. That’s it. The rest of the movie? Utter pish.

***

There are three basic stories that dudes love, and Braveheart ties them all together into one beef jerky bow. First, there’s “dudes hanging out,” then “dudes fighting,” and finally, there’s “the ladies love this dude.” All of these tales can be found in The Odyssey and Braveheart.

I think if I had seen Braveheart back when I was a very recent former teenager and rowdy displays of manliness were impressive, I too would have spent the last two decades saying “freedom!” like a redneck Sean Connery. While Braveheart was busy pushing all the ‘90s gender-affirming man buttons, I was rotting my brain with Oliver Stone. That’s the truth. Yes. I stand by that.

In case you haven’t seen Braveheart, here’s the story: medieval Scottish hunk William Wallace leads a revolt against cruel English occupiers after the King’s soldiers kill his wife. Wallace unites the unruly Scots into a misfit army that proves formidable against King Edward Longshank’s throne until he is betrayed and executed, becoming a martyr in the process. It’s a pretty straightforward tale, a boiled haggis that stuffs Jesus Christ Superstar and Lord of the Rings and The History Channel into a giant hairy scrotum.

I don’t really want to write about Mel Gibson’s drunken, racist, antisemitic rants, his fall from grace, or his second or third Hollywood comeback. I think he’s got a comeback on deck, actually. It's all a matter of record. I watched a recent clip of him on Joe Rogan's podcast, and he was predictably unhinged and uninformed on myriad topics. And yet… he was compelling, and that's because the camera sometimes loves really demented shitbags.

I was an enormous fan of Gibson. And I still am, and if I avoid podcasts, entertainment sites, and social media, I can pretend he’s not a deeply flawed human being paid offensive sums of money to play make-believe. As a recovering alcoholic, I sympathize with anyone who’s struggled with the bottle, as Gibson has admitted. Of course, Recovery 101 clearly states that being an alcoholic doesn’t excuse being a demented shitbag.

I also have to remember there are generations of folks who only knew Gibson's racist rants. He was, for many years, a fantastic movie star, intense and vulnerable, funny and unpredictable. The dude can also direct an action scene. And in 1995, he was a huge box office draw and a talented director.

Speaking of directing, The Passion of the Christ is one of the most volatile and violent "Bible pictures" ever made, a wild mashup of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Easter. His 2006 action movie Apocalypto, about a man trying to reunite with his family during the decline of the 16th-century Mayan Empire, is harrowing, gruesome, and brilliant, a genre triumph.

More recently, as an actor, he was wonderfully vile in writer-director S. Craig Zahler's 2018 neo-noir film Dragged Across Concrete. So yeah, his politics and persona? Loathesome. Onscreen? The lord works in mysterious ways.

Gibson’s reactionary politics are apparent in Braveheart if you look for the not-so-subtle signs. There’s a shockingly homophobic scene where King Edward, played by the great, slippery Patrick McGoohan, pushes the handsome lover of his feckless gay son out a window. The scene is unintentionally campy thanks to McGoohan’s swishy sovereign. His defenestration of his crybaby son’s boyfriend is hilarious but also horrible because Gibson is unable to hide his prejudice. It’s out on display. It’s not surprising he’d hobble his career years later, drunkenly spitting hate at whoever was in front of him.

Another example of Gibson’s conservatism is his decision to dramatize Wallace’s fight against the English in the first place. Forget the struggle of non-white Americans fighting for their rights: Braveheart let white dudes in the ’90s imagine a time when white people were victims of other white people. This is history, but I’ve found that many dudes will ignore America’s long, storied, and easily verified legacy of injustice and inequality, yet embrace that moment, seven hundred years ago, when Scotsmen fought against the tyranny of Englishmen on their tiny island.

What I didn’t expect to find in Braveheart was Mel Gibson’s vanity on full blast. I just don’t understand how anyone with any self-awareness could cast themselves in a movie where they play a flawless, handsome, charming badass who dies a hero. I felt embarrassed watching Braveheart. How could anyone have watched this and not seen it for what it was: a Disney movie for men who are fluent in two — and only two — emotions: *fart noise* and “freedom!”

The cast is a brawny collection of men with nice legs and full beards, including a young Brendan Gleeson. As Queen Isabella, Sophie Marceau does what she can with a character whose main motivation is “Gotta fuck William Wallace.” She would have been a splendid Catherine of France in a production of Henry V, a character who is a spoil of war sweet-talked by a young king who just murdered her entire family.

Wallace’s dad was killed by the English, which is also why he becomes Batman Wearing A Kilt, but I bring this up because the great Brian Cox plays baby Wallace’s one-eyed uncle Argyle. This brash uncle takes Wallace under his wing and educates him and shows him the world, and that’s the movie I’d rather see, but tastes vary.

Okay, so, there is one other scene I liked, in addition to the violence and Les Miserables guy. It’s the scene when the Scots, slathered in warpaint, moon the English and then pull their kilts up again to show their dicks, although the shot is from a distance. That's 90s masculinity for you. Rude, macho, ever so slightly homoerotic.

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