Review: Robin Hood
"Forget history, forget what you've seen before, forget what you think you know," viewers are told at the beginning of Robin Hood, the latest iteration of the durable folk tale about the legendary outlaw who stole from the rich to give to the poor. Whilst nowhere near as dour or serious-minded as Kevin Reynolds' Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves with Kevin Costner or Ridley Scott's Robin Hood with Russell Crowe, this modernised re-telling feels more like a high-budget pilot for the next CW series.
Positing Robin Hood as a medieval-era dark knight, the film begins with Robin of Loxley (Taron Egerton) in a meet-cute with love of his life, Marian (Eve Hewson), the spoiled young man to the manor born taken to task by the fair maiden for not knowing what hard work is. Everything is sunshine and flowers until Robin is drafted into the Crusades, where we see him and others engage in battles shot as if they were doing the film adaptation of Call of Duty or the sequel to American Sniper. Four long years pass and all Robin wants to do is return home to his sweetheart, but he experiences a rude awakening when he finally sets foot in his homeland. It seems that he was pronounced dead some years ago and Marian has moved on with Will Scarlet (Jamie Dornan). She also happens to be working in the coal mines, if one can call doling out food whilst mascaraed to the hilt and garbed in leather jackets that could easily have come straight off the runway working.
To add to his troubles, his property has been seized and he's aghast to discover that the Sheriff of Nottingham (played to dastardly camp perfection by Ben Mendelsohn) has been taxing everyone to fund the ongoing war and stoking everyone's fears about foreigners. Luckily for Robin, he's not as powerless as he believes for Saracen fighter John (Jamie Foxx) has arrived to help him to stop the cycle of the rich getting richer, the powerful becoming more powerful from the blood of the innocents. A couple of training montages later, Robin of Loxley becomes The Hood.
Robin Hood is so genuinely contrived and ludicrous that it makes Guy Ritchie's King Arthur, another film taking a modern and adrenalised approach to a classic tale, look positively Shakespearean. Despite the general freneticism, the overall film is fairly ho-hum. At least the film has energy to spare, even if it's in the service of something messy, predictable and derivative. The best thing it has going for it, apart from Mendelsohn, is Egerton, who certainly has the cocksure swagger and twinkle in his eye to make Robin more interesting on the screen than he has any right to be.
Robin Hood
Directed by: Otto Bathurst
Written by: Ben Chandler, David James Kelly
Starring: Taron Egerton, Jamie Foxx, Ben Mendelsohn, Eve Hewson, Jamie Dornan, Tim Minchin, F. Murray Abraham, Paul Anderson
