Rob Roy
Script/Story: 7
Acting/Casting: 8
Action: 6
Eye Candy: 5
Fun Factor: 4
Replayability: 6
Overall: 8

This movie wasn't enjoyable enough to rate higher, but it's a very good, very hard film.

It's set in Scotland in the 1700s, where the native Scots are poor and being squeezed by the ruling English. Many are poor, starving, and turning to crime, while others stand true to their old values and honesty and rock-solid honor. Rob Roy is one such man with an impossibly-high standard of honor, and it drives the entire plot as he is tricked and screwed by more cunning and ruthless characters, but keeps surviving by his wits, though he suffers greatly, and in the process earns the respect of others with his honesty and character.

At least her survives right up to a climactic duel at the end; a duel against a loathsome enemy who is, unfortunately for Rob, a much superior swordsman. I won't say how that turns out, since this was one of the very, very few movies I've seen where it wasn't obvious 15 minutes into the movie how it would turn out.  Bad things happen to good people, bad guys scheme and succeed, good guys die and get screwed, and it keeps going like that for the entire film. It's very similar Martin's brilliant Song of Fire and Ice fantasy series in that way, where if you've been trained by typical fiction and typical Hollywood product you're shocked as the good guys get victimized, betrayed, and die, while the bad guys are not just cartoon villains, but real people with their own desires and motives. They're doing what they think is best for them, and their actions are completely consistent with their characters. They're not just evil props that pop up to be smote by the good guys, as is the case with so much popular fiction/film.

I can easily see most viewers finding Rob Roy very depressing and unsettling, since after all, we're so used to the good guys triumphing in glorious fashion, while only minor characters suffer along the way, that it's sort of shocking to see a movie with some realism in it. A lot of the dialogue is rather shocking as well, with some of the most hardcore profane conversations I've ever heard. I'm not talking about bad words; those don't mean fucking shit, as any rap song released in the last two decades illustrates. I don't believe Rob Roy has more than a few actual of the seven bad words, but the things people say are so hard, so cruel, and so vile that more than once in the first fifteen minutes I was actually shocked to hear it. 

Here a sample quote from the IMDB quotes page. It's accurate, as best I remember, but I must say that reading it here has far less impact than it does when you hear it delivered in the movie.

On top of the dialogue, it's the amazingly casual and cruel treatment of the weak; women, children, elderly, the poor, that stands out. It's entirely accurate, the way the rich and noble-born regards regarded peasants as basically a less useful form of cattle. If you came into some land and there were 300 people living on it, you threw them the hell off and did with your land as you saw fit to make some profit. Thoughts about what those penniless people would do now didn't enter your mind; they cleared out or you hired some strong arms to kill them and they had about as much legal recourse to complain as the aforementioned cattle.

If you trifled with some chamber maid and knocked her up that was her stupid slut fault for spreading for you, and why on earth should you be concerned that she was now pregnant and about to be sacked for it and turned out into the cold with no more than the clothing on her back? If a lowborn child got in your way, you rode your horse straight over him and laughed; after all, such treatment was the only way to teach the peasants to stay in their place.

Still, accurate or not, few people today, raised with the concepts of human rights and dignity, are very in touch with the historical accuracy of their own lands, or the way things are in much of the less-enlightened world, and if you're like that, you'll find a lot of things that happen in Rob Roy horrifying.  Just so you know.