Director: Ridley Scott
Starring: Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett, Max Von Sydow, Mark Strong, Danny Huston, William Hurt
Score: 7 / 10
This review by Robert Nijman.
Ah, Robin Hood. Outlawed knight of honour. Live-of-the-land, steal-from-the-rich, spend-it-on-the-poor, all-around bon vivant forest pirate. And feathered hat collector. Of course, none of these familiar attributes are actually in the movie – save for his kick-ass archery skills – as this is Ridley’s world. Ridley, who put Atari and Pan Am out of business with his vision of 2019 Los Angeles, gave a sword sporting slave control over the emperor of Rome and had the faith of the Holy Land decided by the hands of a blacksmith, reducing the time immemorial battle between Palestine and Israel to some part-time shenanigan for an axe-wielding pirate elf from Elizabethtown. That Ridley.
It follows then, that the new ‘Robin Hood’ is either not what you had figured to see, or exactly what you had expected. Although I’ll shy away from any Gladiator references – yes, there are plenty and yes, they are all too obvious – this is once again an entirely new history by the man who stocked so many pounds on Crowe’s fat Body of Lies that years later he could not possibly be a forest-dwelling revolutionary from the get-go. This is less ‘Adventures of Robin Hood’ then and more Robin Hood Begins, as the script by the hands of Brian Helgeland (who in a sheer stroke of genius made friar Tuck a moonshining beekeeper – more on that later) takes the entire and rather excessive running time of 140 minutes to explain what made Robin Hood Robin Hood, only to have the end credits follow. It’s a good thing his spin on the universe of the Sherwood Forest philanthropist sufficiently entertains and is basically really quite good up to two-thirds in, or you’d be better off waiting for the sequel they’ve obviously set up here. That is, if the more familiar stories from ballads, legends and many a Hollywood production are your primary interest – and regardless of the fact that second installment might never be the actual plan. Because at heart there’s an interesting and well-written story to ‘Robin Hood’, if only it had kept travelling a bit more along the beaten path and a little less towards that third act that seems to come from nowhere and go all ‘Waterworld’ on you.
This time around, Robin’s adventures start in the final days of Richard The Lionheart’s Crusade and have him storm castles like it’s an uneven game of paintball that has the opposing team wield water pistols. On of the final days of the last campaign, the king is struck by an arrow and killed on site. Robin and his battle fatigued friends seize the opportunity to head back to England, but run across an ambush from the inevitable bad guy that marks the demise of Sir Robert Loxley (chosen to deliver the crown to the mourning Court of London), who in his final moments asks Robin to deliver his emotionally charged sword to his dying father. A burden not quite what our jolly forest friend was expecting to bring home. Enter Cate Blanchett as Maid Marion to brighten his days – and ours as well, as per usual. Sporting a die-cast and precautionarily locked chastity belt, she’s somewhat of a 12th century fox (insert more puns here, but only puns – you’ll need the key to her heart to insert anything else) awaiting prince charming. Oh. Wait. Different Hood. Strike that. Blanchett is Marion Loxley, caretaker of the estate of Sir Robert Loxley and loyal to the real king, Richard the Lionheart. Wife to a murdered husband, daughter of a dying man and she will have her vengeance, in this life or in the next.. Wait. No. Well, yes actually, but let’s try that once more. Marion is the widower of Robert Loxley, who takes Robin in as a guest when he turns up to deliver on his promise to her deceased husband. As it turns out, her dying father (the always commanding Max von Sydow) conveniently knows a thing or two about Robin’s past and offers to share these stories – if Robin accepts to pose as the returned Sir Robert so that Marion will not lose the estate if and when her father-in-law dies. This is where the plot gets a little thick, but it’s still quite good. Slow paced, but interesting and well crafted – both cinematically as by all actors involved. As to be expected, in the hands of Scott and given the aforementioned principals, supported by the likes of Danny Huston, William Hurt and an extremely joyfully evil Mark Strong in the role of a proper bad guy. Not Sheriff Nottingham, mind you, whose small part is inexplicably played by Matthew Macfadyen – you’d half expect him to wear tights.
The French, then. Although you might not have expected them to be in this movie at all, it’s always good to have them on board isn’t it? Take their king, for example (please, take him). Unlike the brave and respected – if a little bit of an alcoholic – Richard The Lionheart or his questionable brother, whom you’ll expect to turn evil in good Dauphin tradition before it’s all over, King Philippe is somewhat of a flat, if extremely well-groomed yet vaguely smelling of elderberries, character who makes Cristiano Ronaldo look like Wayne Rooney, in effect making royalty look good even though he just spent a considerable amount of time crossing the Canal. He’s not so much here to bend it like Beckham however as he is to just bend (whoa, that little Ronaldo/Rooney analogy for just the one gag?). For good old England, that is, as the world’s crappiest invasion ever somehow became part of the whole outlaw living in the woods thing. Probably because Scott just doesn’t seem to be able to shake off his big love for even bigger cinematic battlefields, and not so much to the actual requisite of the story. Either way, it becomes painfully clear the French are better at having their beaches stormed than they are at doing the actual storming. When the time inexplicably comes to have England invaded, one century-and-a-half after Bayeux battled Hastings, the actual campaign at Omaha, no Utah, no Folkestone beach lasts just about long enough for the French King to utter ‘alors on debarque’, quickly followed by unsubtitleable mutterings (‘run away!’, perhaps?), as thanks to Lady Irony’s little quirks the French never really did devise a word for either retreat or surrender. Or did they? Either way, their attack from the sea all smells a bit Vichy, and is by all accounts completely uncalled for. Good thing Maximus Robin (damn, I promised myself I wouldn’t do that) and his band of merry men were around to lead the English troops in the valiant struggle against their contemporary foe and thereby end this ridiculous if entertaining storyline once and for all, so that Robin of the Hood and his Marion can peacefully – and finally – settle in the forest, where the prince of thieves belongs.
(Oh, wait. Forgot to come back on the whole Tuck as a beekeeper thing. Guess that’ll have to wait till the sequel as well.)
