Robin Hood

The story of Robin Hood – the outlawed English bowman who lives in Sherwood Forest with his band of Merry Men, robbing from the rich, giving to the poor, and generally being a thorn in the side of the Sherriff of Nottingham and bad Prince John – is so well known as to be truly iconic.

His story is one of the great tropes of English tradition, told in ballads and songs from the mid-15th Century onwards (although references to individuals known as ‘Robinhood’ and ‘Robehod’ occur in the rolls of several English Justices between 1261 and 1300). In the 16th Century, troubadours made Robin a member of the nobility and gave him a love interest, while the modern Robin Hood – a philanthropist Saxon fighting Norman persecution – is a product of the Victorian era and writers such as Howard Pyle and Sir Walter Scott.

In making Robin Hood, the challenge facing filmmaker Ridley Scott (director of such classic films as Alien, Bladerunner and Gladiator) and screenwriter Brian Helgeland (LA Confidential, Mystic River) was how to tell this well-known story in a new and original way.

The first treatment for the film, by Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris, would have been boldly different, making Robin a much darker character and the Sherriff of Nottingham the real hero; but Scott – and his Robin Hood, Australian actor Russell Crowe – quickly junked that idea.

Instead, Scott’s point of difference lies in telling the origin story of Robin Hood, for all the world as if his film were the first installment in a new superhero franchise.

Unfortunately, it’s not a success.

Opening in France in 1199 AD, as King Richard the Lionheart fights his way home from the Crusades, the film portrays Robin as a dour, stubborn archer whose flight from the battlefield where Richard is slain becomes complicated when he promises to return the dying Sir Robert of Locksley’s sword to his ancestral home of Nottingham.

Impersonating the dead nobleman, Robin returns to England, where the ailing Sir Walter Locksley (Max Von Sydow) and his feisty, proto-feminist daughter-in-law Lady Marion (Cate Blanchett) await the return of their prodigal son and husband. When Robin arrives, Sir Walter implores him to continue pretending to be Sir Robert in order to ward off any other would-be heirs, much to Marion’s horror; but slowly the initial antipathy between she and Robin turns to love.

Meanwhile, the villainous Sir Godfrey (screen villain du jour Mark Strong) plots to turn England’s nobles against their new liege, the callow and venal King John (Oscar Isaac) in order to facilitate a successful invasion by his master, King Philip of France.

Unfortunately for audiences, there is little to recommend in this latest version of Robin Hood. As with the trend in comic books to render once glittering, larger-than-life icons like Batman and Superman into gritty and angst-ridden contemporary characters, in making this account of the outlaw’s life ‘realistic’, the filmmakers have lost the original sparkle and romance of the legend.

The story sags under a barrage of unnecessary details, such as Robin’s discovery that his late father was responsible for drafting the Magna Carta (anyone with an eye for historical accuracy will be grinding their teeth in frustration by the final moments of the film’s 140-minute running time) and the hodge-potch of politics, revisionism and family angst considerably impacts on the pacing, with the film really only finding its feet in the film’s third and final act.

The numerous battle scenes, while dramatically shot, are overly reliant on clichés such as ‘arrow-cam’; the many characters are so thinly drawn as to be mere ciphers; and lazy storytelling abounds. The production design is strong but inconsistent – sets are liberally decorated with random ruins and standing stones in order to establish an ‘olde worlde’ atmosphere, and a rustic musical sequence halfway through the film is truly jarring – while none of the performances (save for John Hurt as William Marshall, a nobleman loyal to the throne, though not necessarily the man who sits in it) are especially memorable. The chemistry between Crowe and Blanchett is particularly poor, while their burgeoning relationship is sketched out in the most perfunctory of details.

A sober, serious and ploddingly earnest re-telling of the legendary English hero, Robin Hood is neither memorable nor especially original. Like other films seeking to explore the historical ‘truth’ behind a legend, such as Antoine Fuqua’s woeful King Arthur and Wolfgang Petersen’s equally laboured Troy (both released in 2004), in removing any sense of wonder from the story, Scott and Helgeland have drained it of any magic.

Robin Hood

Directed by Ridley Scott from a screenplay by Brian Helgeland. Story by Brian Helgeland, Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris.

Stars Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett, Max Von Sydow, William Hurt, Mark Strong and Eileen Atkins.

In general release from Thursday May 13, 2010.

www.robinhoodthemovie.com