Braveheart: O Desafio do Guerreiro

In this mix of historical tragedy and hip adventure, Gibson may be as galvanic a movie swashbuckler as Errol Flynn and Burt Lancaster were in their day.

As the star of the new, epic-scaled Braveheart, Gibson celebrates yet another man of selfless valor. And as its director, he displays some daring of his own.

Braveheart is a big, brave, heartfelt motion picture, an epic that doesn't lose itself in its epic scale. How long has it been since this kind of picture has packed this much passion and punch?

A lavish, entertaining spectacle full of manly men, dastardly villains, rousing battles and women who easily see Mel's hero potential through all that messy hair.

Many movies deal with battlefield heroics. Few seriously attempt to define heroism.

In addition to staging battle scenes well, Gibson also manages to recreate the filth and mood of 700 years ago.

Though Gibson's film isn't smart on this subject or even really aware of it, it has few modern rivals as an example of the ways a movie can rend history into compellingly simplistic myth.

Braveheart is a big, strapping medieval sword-and-arrow movie with more fighting than romance, a surprising abundance of lush and sensuous imagery considering its brutal strife, and Gibson fiercely inciting it to stand up and march.

There are too many betrayals, too many decapitations. We overload on grime and blood and rage. It's as if Gibson were trying to sustain an adrenaline rush for all 173 minutes of the film.

Epic in length only and peppered with sniggering homophobia, the homage to Himself drags on for three hours going on three years.

Braveheart wants to be nothing less than a chest-beating epic, and Gibson almost pulls it off. If the movie is not a cohesive whole, it still demonstrates an intoxicating love for adventure.

It's Mel Gibson's movie all the way, and he comes through triumphantly.

Gibson puts us in the peculiar position of longing for him to die. Braveheart overstays its welcome. It's an epic looking not only for a point but an exit line.

Powerful, confident and fiercely unapologetic about its movie-movie sensibility, Braveheart insists that escapism needn't be synonymous with mindlessness.

Braveheart doesn't amount to much more than theatrical chest-thumping by Gibson. He clearly knows how to put a movie together, but he is going to have to get over himself before that knowledge does anyone any good.

Not quite [a classic]. Still, in orchestrating its raw energy, evocative beauty and senses-shattering violence to compelling emotional peaks, Mel Gibson shows he's got the goods to be as powerful a force in the director's chair as he is at the box office.

In only his second film behind the camera, Gibson has crafted a historical epic, Braveheart, that stands tall among the biggest and the best: Lawrence of Arabia, Ben-Hur, El Cid.

[Braveheart] is stirring in ways that not too many movies are, and to a degree that not too many movies achieve. You fight it, but it wins.

Gibson is solidly on course as a director, and likewise in his element as an actor, once he stops being Mel Gibson.

It's unclear when Mel Gibson became a combination of Sam Peckinpah and Akira Kurosawa, but there's no question that Braveheart is one of the best epic movies of the '90s... Scene after scene takes your breath away with its sometimes cruel beauty.