Henry Saw: Robin Hood

A lot of mistakes went into making this one...


The character of Robin Hood does not have the most glorious cinematic history. Douglass Fairbanks was the first actor to portray the English folk hero on screen, in a little seen 1922 movie, and the clips I've seen of that film are quite cool. The most beloved interpretation of Robin Hood is Errol Flynn's rendition in 1938's The Adventures of Robin Hood. The movie is gorgeous to look at, and is fun in a corny way, but it is over-rated and hasn't aged particularly well. Since 1938, we've gotten a Disney version (a childhood favorite but not one of Disney's best), a version of "old" Robin Hood with Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn, and Kevin Costner's mullet, among others. It's easy to understand why Ridley Scott and Russel Crowe thought they could make their mark on the character on film.

This film started as a script called Nottingham. It was going to be a retelling of the Robin Hood legend but told from the perspective of the Sheriff of Nottingham. Original reports had Crowe starring as the Sheriff with some younger English stud (Christian Bale?) co-starring as the antagonist. For some reason, perhaps the studio thought audiences did not want to see Robin Hood as the villain, that idea was scrapped. So Scott and Crowe decided to do the next best thing, I guess, and make a prequel.

And that is Mistake #1: The Prequel thing. Do we really need a Batman Begins/Casino Royale for Robin Hood? Is that something anyone wants to see? Maybe I would not be saying this if the movie was better, but the fact that this movie takes its full 140 minutes to tell what other Robin Hood movies have gotten across in 20 minutes, just did not sit right with me.



For the first half-hour of the movie I thought all the critics who had given it a bad review were out of their minds. We open with a castle siege led by Richard the Lionhearted. This is Ridley Scott doing what he does best. The best moments of Kingdom of Heaven had nothing to do with Orlando Bloom (obviously), or Eva Green, or even Ed Norton or Liam Neeson. It was the siege and defense of Jerusalem. Scott flexes his epic battle scene muscles again for the opening of Robin Hood. The coordination, the clarity of events, the scope...the opening of Robin Hood is fantastic. We meet Crowe's Robin Hood as a confident and loyal archer in Richard's army. After an enjoyable, but forced, encounter with Richard after the battle, Robin and his friends end up in the stockades. True to history, Richard's death during another siege allows Robin and company to escape into the French woods.

Inter-cut with these early battle sequences are three different strands and characters that will all connect at the end of the film. The first, and actually the first major character we see on screen, is Cate Blanchett's Lady Marian. With her husband away at war, she is forced to deal with young thieves raiding her stockyards. We see that she is living with her husband's father (Max Von Sydow) and trying to run a 5000 acre patch of land by herself. We also see Richard's brother John, next in line for the throne, sleeping with the niece of the French King and dealing with an over-bearing mother. Finally, we get John's best friend Godfrey, played by the always captivating Mark Strong, working both sides and planning a plot against England with King Philip of France. This is mistake #2: Too much stuff. I love the history involved with this movie, and no single strand of Robin Hood can be singled out as bad, but there's just a bit too much going on.

Soon, Robin and his "men" have found a way to cross the channel to France that involves Robin pretending to be Sir Robert Loxley, crossing paths with Godfrey, and ending up at Cate Blanchett and Max Von Sydow's doorstep. This leads to a good 40 minutes of Ridley Scott remaking The Return of Martin Guerre (mistake #3) but completely devoid of humor or drama. Meanwhile, the French army, led by Godfrey, is raping and pillaging Northern England like they were Jason Isaac's Red Coats in The Patriot, and newly crowned King John is ranting about taxes, and William Hurt is bored in a worthless supporting role, and some other stuff.



I guess this is where I need to bring up the movie Gladiator. It's inevitable. Russel Crowe and Ridley Scott have now teamed up five times. The first, and greatest, was Gladiator. It's a nearly perfect action film, it won Best Picture, and earned Russel Crowe a Best Action Oscar. A Good Year, in which Crowe played Max (not Maximus...get it?) was a ****ing disaster. American Gangster and Body of Lies followed, Crowe was okay-to-good in smaller parts, but neither movie made a real impact. This is their first movie that actively invites comparisons with Gladiator. Both are action epics, both have an all-time older actor taking Crowe's character under his wing, both have a strong female who has an awkward relationship with Crowe, both have Crowe joking around with a small group of friends, and both have Crowe being thrown a weapon while he's riding on a horse (mistake #48). That last one might be a small thing, but anyone who has seen Gladiator will recognize that "move", and it's quite jarring. The lack of originality in the action scenes, outside of the opening siege, is disappointing.

The acting in the film is fine, competent, but hardly memorable. Russel Crowe looks old, never seems that invested, and has an accent that is all over the place. Blanchett is given nothing to do, which is shameful, as she is probably the best working actress in cinema. Max Von Sydow is always good, as is Mark Strong, but no one else is remotely interesting. William Hurt looks incredibly bored, Oscar Isaac brings something to the table as King John but has the wrong look, and Robin's "merry men" are interchangeable.



Finally we come to a conclusion that starts with Russel Crowe uniting the dukes of Northern England with a big speech about liberty. Apparently we're watching the creation of the Magna Carta, kinda, though I think that point will be missed by most American audiences. His speech is dull, delivered with none of the passion seen in Gibson's Braveheart or Branagh's Henry V, though we are thankfully spared the speech to the troops when the battle begins. The battle, fought on the beach near the cliffs of Dover, is surprisingly lame. While the sheer amount of horses is impressive, its nothing we haven't seen in Return of the King, and the rest of the sequence offers little.

It doesn't help that it begins with the worst moment in a movie so far this year. Cate Blanchett, left behind in Nottingham when Crowe and company galloped to war, shows up in a full suit of armor. Not only that, but she's brought along a group of children, riding ponies, who had been hiding out in the forest. It's ridiculous. Not only does it make one think of Elizabeth: The Golden Age, or Eowyn in Return of the King, but it is an agonizing example of Hollywood feeling forced to throw in a woman's empowerment moment when it just doesn't belong. The fight itself is weakened by the fact that we see children, on ponies, killing French soldiers who are in full armor. We never know which character we're supposed to follow, the climatic confrontation between Mark Strong and Russel Crowe is a mess, and it just sort of putters out at the end.

The final scene, where Robin Hood is declared an OUTLAAAAAAW, comes out of nowhere. One definitely senses that there was an entire sequence, to bridge the battle and the final scene, that was cut out due to running time. Perhaps there's a great 4 hour version of this film out there, the Director's Cut of Kingdom of Heaven is significantly better than the theatrical version, but I doubt it. The movie just meanders for too long, offers the least satisfying conclusion, and feels entirely useless at the end.



I wanted to like the film, I'm a big fan of both Ridley Scott and Russel Crowe, but this just did not work. The first half-hour is great, and if its playing on an airplane or on cable you should be sure to watch it, but just turn it off after that. The film never gives us a reason to think that it should have been made. Would have I have liked a movie following Richard the Lionheart and his return home? Yes. Would have I enjoyed a film focusing on the politics behind John's rise to power and the creation of the Magna Carta? Yes. Would I ever like to rewatch this movie, which touches on those subjects, but to no end, and fails on every other level? No.

Grade: C+

Best Scene: The opening castle siege...