I’m 32 years old now and it’s time for me to put away childish things. One of those is the idea that Ridley Scott, the visionary director of
Alien and
Blade Runner, will ever return to the kind of inspired filmmaker that started his career. Or will he continue being a Hollywood director-for-hire of genre pictures. Come to think of it, those two early films of his were genre pictures: slasher and science fiction, respectively. Since then he’s made fantasy, road movie, epic, thriller, war and romantic comedy, often with little critical success, but massive box office results which is probably his reason for continuing in this vein.
I liked
Robin Hood a lot better when I was 13 years old and it starred Kevin Costner. Not that the newly updated version directed by Scott from a screenplay by Brian Helgeland from a story by Helgeland, Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris is all bad. And certainly not to suggest that the previous film was really good. The logical question to ask is, Why another film version of the Robin Hood legend?
The answer is that Hollywood loves returning to the same well again and again. Another possible reason is that this one, though it takes place at the turn of the 14th century, contemporizes the background elements. King Richard the Lionheart (Danny Huston) is returning home from the crusades via France and sacking castles that stand in his way. The man who will later become Robin Hood is a mere archer for hire in his army, known initially as Robin Lonstride and played with typical brooding and smoldering intensity by Russell Crowe.
Unlike previous depictions of Richard I in this legendary tale, this one is more up front about the nature of The Crusades. They do not shy away from Richard’s nature, the fact that he went on an ostensibly religious mission to convert the pagans of The Holy Land to Christianity, impoverishing his own country in the process. Robin, of course, is established early on as morally virtuous, despite his involvement in the wholesale slaughter of Arabs. He relates to the king a moment during a massacre when a woman looked up at him not with fear or hatred, but with pity. Robin has the gall to stand face to face with the King and tell him that his Crusade was wrong. This doesn’t work out so well for Robin.
While I don’t think the screenwriters necessarily intend to draw a parallel between England’s Crusade under Richard I and The United States’ War on Terror, surely the seed for that story development came from contemporary history, all the way to depicting a country full of people who have given over all their tax money to fight an unwinnable war.
Maybe it’s obvious by this point that this is not the Robin Hood we all know from Errol Flynn to Sean Connery and the Disney animation. Sure, there’s Little John (Kevin Durand) and Will Scarlet (Scott Grimes), Friar Tuck (Mark Addy) and Marian (the lovely Cate Blanchett). Robin is not of Loxley, although he later has the chance to pose, for reasons far too complicated to get into, as Robert of Loxley. There’s even a scene in which Robin and his men (sometimes merry, but not yet Merry Men) steal seed grain in order to return it to its rightful owners, but this is not what Robin is about…yet.
An incredibly convoluted plot precludes the possibility of my explaining it effectively here, but I’ll provide the broad strokes. Richard dies in battle in France, but that doesn’t matter because he would have been ambushed and killed by Godfrey, an English double agent played by Mark Strong, who was also the one-dimensional baddie in last year’s
Sherlock Holmes. Godfrey wants Prince John to be elevated to the throne and then wreak havoc across the English countryside in the name of King John so the land barons will rise up against him in civil war, thus paving the way for the French army to easily invade and conquer. What’s in it for Godfrey? Well it’s in service to the plot, duh!
Robin and his pals pose as knights to receive safe passage back to England. Incredible coincidence offers Robin a sword with a familiar inscription and then lands him in the home of the blind old Walter Loxley (Max von Sydow, trying very hard to maintain what’s left of his dignity by appearing in a film far beneath his talent) who may know something about Robin’s long lost father. Here he meets Marian, who was married to the man whose identity Robin has borrowed.
Prince John is portrayed by Oscar Isaacs in a performance that bounces from evil maniacal to foolishly naïve and then back. Why is it so difficult for Hollywood screenwriters to paint morally ambiguous villains? Why must we be bombarded with cartoonish venom? Mercifully Eileen Atkins signed on to play the role of John’s mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, so we have some reserved and professional acting to balance out the bombastic Isaacs. William Hurt is also along for the ride as the King’s Marshal, a trusted confidante of Richard’s summarily dismissed by John upon his ascension.
If you’re going for the action, there’s plenty of it. Although Scott has a good deal of experience directing big action set pieces there is nothing here on the level of
Black Hawk Down or even
Gladiator. Many of the battle sequences are marred by jarring close-ups that provide no sense of perspective on the action. Some of that blame should probably be placed on film editor Pietro Scalia, despite his great work on the two aforementioned films, even winning the Oscar for the former.
There’s little here to get really excited about. It just about meets expectations for a film of this nature. Do you think there will be a big climactic battle sequence? Do you think Robin and Marian will fall in love, even if the step from admiration to “I love you” is actually a leap? Do you think Tuck, a beekeeper in this incarnation of the story, will use his bees as a weapon at some point? And why the hell are Peter Pan’s Lost Boys running around the forest waiting to become saviors at the end?
Most disappointing of all was the realization at the end that this Robin Hood is nothing more than an origin story, a two hour commercial for the next in the series. Because that’s all they do in Hollywood nowadays: remakes, sequels and prequels. Hey, this one is two of those at the same time.
