The advertising for Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood doesn’t quite make it clear, but this is not another rendition of the Merry Men in Sherwood Forest stealing from the rich and giving to the poor.
Even the introductory title cards, which explain that from under the tyranny of lord and law “the outlaw takes his place in history,” hardly make clear that King John’s spittle-spraying declaration of Robin as “an outlaw!” does not occur until the very end.
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In fact, nearly everything familiar from the trailer – including the inevitable arrow fired William Tell-like between the fingers of an official posting a document announcing new, higher taxes – is drawn from the last 10 minutes or so.
If this sounds like a refreshing change from all the other Robin Hood incarnations, to a certain extent it is (after all, at this point the character’s been played by everyone from Errol Flynn to Cary Elwes, with an animated fox in between).
But those familiar with the production history will tell you Scott’s project began as something far more interesting and unorthodox: Nottingham, a retelling of the classic from the Sheriff of Nottingham’s point of view, was at one point to have cast the same actor as both the sympathetic Sheriff and antagonist Robin Hood.
The involvement of Scott’s longtime muse, Russell Crowe, saw things reconfigured into a more conventional design. Crowe plays Maximus Decimus Meridius – sorry, Sir Robert Loxley – sorry, common archer Robin Longstride pretending to be Robert Loxley in order to bring home the crown of the captured King Richard the Lionheart (Danny Huston).
Longstride/Loxley, who by film’s end has earned the moniker Robin of the Hood, is the same virtuous but hard-done-by character Crowe played in Gladiator merely stripped of his wheat-filled visions of the afterlife and transplanted into the Middle Ages.
Fulfilling a promise to the dying knight Sir Robert Loxley, he assumes the identity of the man’s son in order to bring the king’s crown home to England and return Loxley’s sword to his father, Sir Walter Loxley (Max von Sydow), in Nottingham, where the younger Loxley’s widow, Marion (Cate Blanchett), also awaits, newly in need of a husband to prevent the court from seizing their family lands.
Meanwhile, the craven and corrupt King John (Oscar Isaac, who does a marvelous job of acting completely unstable), brother and successor to Richard, is proving himself unsuitable for the crown by unwittingly sending the traitorous Sir Godfrey (Mark Strong in another malevolent villain role), an agent of France, to raise additional revenue from over-taxed northern barons.
After some bewildering politicking over inalienable rights and an abortive public signing of the Magna Carta, good meets evil on the English coast in a mash-up of Braveheart with Saving Private Ryan’s Normandy scene.
If there’s one thing to be said for certain, it’s that even at 140 minutes this is not the dour, humourlouss slog some critics are making it out to be; what kind of gritty, over-serious film would have its heroine lead a brigade of pony-riding feral child-bandits, Xena-like, into the climactic battle?
There is ample humour throughout, although the vast majority of it is unnecessarily lewd – Hollywood continues to think sex jokes become classy when they are delivered in what screenwriters likely refer to as Ye Olde English.
And while it moves along at a fair clip, Robin Hood, though involving enough by virtue of its art direction, cinematography and general attention to detail, lacks any emotional heft. The closest we get to caring is enjoying ourselves watching the cast Scott pulled together for the tale.
Notwithstanding her brief battlefield appearance (the same hollow attempt at female empowerment that saw Keira Knightley’s Guinevere turned into Boadicea in King Arthur), Cate Blanchett makes a perfect Medieval Penelope, faithful but staunchly independent after 10 years of running her household with her husband off at war.
Crowe is Crowe – maybe a bit too earnest, but consistently believable. And the camaraderie between Robin and his future Merry Men is palpable. Add Mark Strong, Danny Huston, William Hurt, Oscar Isaac, and the inimitable Max von Sydow to the mix, and even without characters whose deaths would be particularly upsetting, it would take a real cynic to call this hard to watch.
Since Robin Hood ends at the beginning, so to speak, much of the fun in watching – as was the case with the Star Wars prequels – comes from seeing the mythology unfold. Anticipating and making little, notable connections, such as the first time Robin’s men describe themselves as “merry,” or the first mention of Nottingham or Marion, becomes a game as the generic Medieval adventure of the first act slowly gives way to familiar people and places.
Michael Curtiz’s 1938 The Adventures of Robin Hood remains the gold standard for swashbuckling adventures in Sherwood Forest, but Scott has built a solid enough foundation that when talk of a sequel inevitably begins, there will be potential for a worthy re-envisioning of the core Robin Hood myth.