Robin Hood

Ridley Scott’s big screen effort is like a slice of honey-baked ham between two air-filled buns or, more annoyingly, a novel with only the first couple of chapters included. The air-filled buns are the opening and closing generically-executed, big budget battle scenes, the honey-baked ham in the middle is the Crowe-Blanchett pairing. Of the missing chapters more later.

There is no denying that Robin Hood is well-made. This is Ridley Scott after all and everything about the production is first class. An army of set builders have created a handsome simulacrum of medieval England and although some CGI has been used, the settings both interior and exterior, look remarkably real. Particularly in its mid-section it sways one as an updating of the old school historical adventure romance. Crowe is no Errol Flynn, leaping around in green tights and a feathered cap, but playing the kind of alpha male he has been doing so well since Hammers Over The Anvil (1993) he is a compelling screen presence whilst Blanchett makes for a lissom Maid Marion. Together the two have an easy rapport that no doubt has much to do with their common cultural background and the build of their slow burn romance is deftly handled. In smaller parts, the seemingly unstoppable Max Von Sydow and a laconic William Hurt are seasoned foils to the film's less noble protagonists.

Where the film fails is in the homogenized treatment of its material. This has become an endemic problem for American multiplex film-making – the reduction of every story to the Joseph Campbell-defined hero’s journey narrative template and the production line rendition of its expression. It would seem that so much money is at stake with these productions that conceptual and formal recycling is mandatory, inventiveness and individuation anathema. In aesthetic terms these films are locked into the tried and true from Day 1.  Robin Hood is not Son Of Gladiator but Richard's brother Prince John (Oscar Isaac) is that film’s Commodus, the climactic quick-fire, sonically amped-up battle scene looks like CGI –altered off-cuts from Saving Private Ryan (1998), Mark Strong as Godfrey is your standard sociopathic bad ass andMaid Marion is turned into a sword-wielding Boadicea, albeit one with a hair stylist (of her cohort of child warriors on midget ponies, the less said the better). Scott’s direction is characteristically stylish and bombastic whilst the script by Brian Helgeland has all the standard motifs and devices of the action movie.

This yet-another-Hollywood-blockbuster syndrome is perhaps less injurious to the film than the fact that there really isn’t much of the legend of Robin and his merrie band of men to be seen. Robin Longstride aka Robin of the Hood (as opposed to "the ‘hood") is presented here as the unheralded saviour of England whose Dad was responsible for putting together the Magna Carta (and thereby establishing Western liberal democratic civilization). This mantle of greatness is a sort of wearable fiction but when one eventually realizes that it is the cloak for a proposed franchise (as the end title has it: Let the legend begin...)  one feels, frankly, used. Scott's film should have been called Robin Hood - The Prequel and we could have waited for the real deal   I would be willing to bet that it is a strategy that will backfire. There is simply not enough here to whet the appetites of the Die Hard crowd whilst those who expected Robin to be pitting his wits against the Sheriff of Nottingham will be too alienated by the shameless bilking to go back to see if Russ can carry off green tights.

Want more about this film?

Want something different?