RottenTomato verdict: 44%
Released: May 12th 2010
Directed by: Ridley Scott
One line Summary
Some impressive set-pieces, but this join-the-dots film leaves much to be desired
Brief Review
The trailer for this film seemed to happily confirm my assumptions - that this was a gritty retelling of the traditional Robin Hood tale, directed by the man who directed one of my favourite films, Gladiator. What the trailer deftly doesn’t tell you, is that the film is a prefilm which takes you right to the beginning of the story we all know and love, and stops. Infact, for a film called ‘Robin Hood’ it impressively fails to live up to anything you might have expected from a film with that name.
This wouldn’t be so bad if the story itself was welltold and compelling, but it seems to be an odd connection of dots, where we are required to draw the lines ourselves.
Full Review
The film starts in 1199, where King Richard the Lionheart (Danny Huston), is on his way home from the Crusades, pausing en route to lay siege to a French castle. As you do, when you’re a crusading King, I suppose. This turns out to be a bad idea on his part, as it leads to his death - and through a fairly limp series of connections Robin Longstride (Russel Crowe) ends up being in charge of returning his crown to England, and also an ancestral sword (tm) from a dying knight to his fathers estate in Nottingham. Coincidentally, it seems this is also the same ‘neck of the woods’ that Robin seems to be from.
On the way, Robin makes an enemy of Godfrey (Mark Strong), and English knight with French allegiances. He’s bald, dour and wears black - so initial suspicions he is a Bad Guy. Subsequent attempts to kill random people, and the murder of Robin’s teenage friend (which Robin seems to promptly forget) encourage this assumption. Robin also manages to give him an impressive facial scar with an arrow. Aswell as being cliched, this means he also now dedicates himself to hunting Robin around England, with no more motive than that.
England’s not doing particularly well, as the Crusades seem to have taken most of the money it had. (Ex-King) Richard’s brother, King John (Oscar Issac) is played with all the layers of a brick. He’s lecherous and adulterous, rude to his mother, goes back on his word, also dresses in black, whines in a spoiled childish way... he’s the Bad Guy. There is no attempt to make him anything but the Bad Guy. So, ofcourse, he decides to solve the financial crisis by taxing everything in the country that moves, twice. And happily sends a bunch of henchman round (led by Godfrey) to make people pay up. If the people refuse, they burn things. They’re happy people.
Robin Hood, meanwhile, has found the estate of the ancestral sword (tm), home to Sir Walter Loxley (aging and possibly mad) and his buxom fiesty daughter-in-law (tm), Marian (Cate Blanchett), who is running the estate for him. She does this with a fairly impressive tenacity, from working fields to looking after children. She’s fairly feminist and also fairly unlikely considering the hold of fervent Christianity, but who cares - it makes a nice story. Robin arrives reluctantly, gives news of the sons death, and manages to get ‘forced’ into pretending to be his son returned (thus Marions husband), so as to secure the estate. Ofcourse, her and Robin really don’t get on to begin with - with her threatening to ‘sever his manhood’ if he were to go near her. This fiery opposition inevitably fails, with a notably cringeworthy scene where Marion has to help Robin ‘take his chainmail off’.
Oh, and the estate is also under the occasional siege of the mysterious and unexplained children from the forest, where boys orphaned by the Crusades seem to go to live for some reason.
Godfrey, as I mentioned before, has French allegiances - so uses his job of ‘helping the King tax the people’ to cause unrest and anger against King John, especially among the ‘Barons of the North’. He also plans to help a large amount of French soldiers invade during the unrest and potential civil war - allowing them to take over the throne with relative ease. Well, that’s the plan anyway. When King John gets wind of this, he realises he needs to pull everybody together.
It turns out that Robins father was a dreamer with the power to persuade others, and thought up the concept of a Charter of Rights for everybody, for which he was promptly executed. He did manage to think up the terrible mantra “rise up and rise up until lambs become lions” which is nice in thought, except they keep repeating it alittle more often than it deserves. Anyway, some of the Barons, including Loxley, really like this idea, and Robin catches on just in time to jump into King John rallying speech and galvanise the Barons to demand their rights. King John agrees in return for their help in defeating the French.
Customary brief scene where Godfrey and his men demand taxes from Loxleys estate in Nottingham, which they refuse as they’re ridiculously poor. So obviously the solution is to burn everybody alive in the barn. Robin arrives just in time to save the day, ofcourse, and the forest lost boys turn up and help too. Unfortunately, it’s all just too late to stop Godfrey killing the old Sir Loxley - who ofcourse challenges to a dual despite the fact the old man is blind. Pride gets the better of Godfrey when the old man manages to hurt him despite his disability, so ofcourse death ensues. Cliche and predictability seem to be a large part of the story here.
The climax of the film occurs on the south coast, where a coallition army of the Barons, mysteriously led by Robin himself, fight on the coast against the landing army of French soldiers. Robin manages the impressive feat of leading the first flights of arrows from the cliffs then also managing to lead the charge of soldiers from the beach, despite the fact these acts occur pretty simultaneously. Marion, who in every other scene she’s had makes a point of being pragmatic and responsible, has decided to bring her newly befriended woodland boys, unarmoured and on ponys, to fight the French army too. They look about 12, but turns out they can fight with impressive skill with crazy moves, and the French soldiers are obviously too nice to take advantage, so it’s fine. The English defeat the French, and Robin kills Godrey with, ofcourse, a well-aimed arrow over a ridiculously long distance.
Ofcouse, King John goes back on his word and burns the Charter of Rights, declaring Robin an outlaw. He’s a Bad Guy, remember? The next scene is a fairly impressive jump to everybody (Robin, Marion etc) living happily in a forest village in Sherwood Forest, presumably leading on for everybody to become the Merry Men, in the inevitable sequel. Leave out how exactly they managed to build a small town in a forest in such a small amount of time, and how obvious it would be they were in there.
In the films favour, and also Scotts, there were some impressive set pieces, including battle scenes and a nack of capturing Englands wild beauty and the realities of castle and city life in that period. But it’s not really enough to balance a meandering and convoluting plot, and a dull and cliched story. Crowe himself had a character that was suprisingly sidelined for a film bearing his name, and an accent that varied notably. When reviewers pointed this out to him, he apparently got quite angry - and actually walked out of an interview for BBC Radio 4!
I think the film has taken too many cliched and ludicrous liberties for it to be a classic. Robinhood has gone from being the humble leader of men in Sherwood Forest, to a leader of Englands armies to curb the French invasion, and instrumental in the creation of the Magna Carta. That’s a pretty impressive leap! Mainly my gripe is that the story seemed to jump from one nice set-piece to another, whist ignoring the necessary inbetween plot which holds it together. It was alittle like Scott had assumed we knew the story so well already we didn’t need these pesky details explaining, or these plots threads actually finishing - and there’s so much inevitability and cliche that he can almost be forgiven. But this is a new story - and the film comes off unfinished and unpolished, which is probably not what something of this expense should look like.
Apparently, the first iteration of the film was entitled ‘Nottingham’ and had Crowe playing the Sherrif of Nottingham, with the story retold from his point of view. In my opinion, this would have been a much more interesting film.
Cinema, dvd or tv
I watched this in the cinema, but with hindsight it’s not worth the price - I might watch this on a decent sized tv, but I wont be buying the dvd.
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