Robin Hood

The outlaw again returned to screens in 2018 with no merriment in sight. Could a little fun revive the flight of the righteous arrow?

In 2014 episode ‘Robot Of Sherwood’, Doctor Who poked fun at the Time Lord’s impatience with Robin Hood’s relentless mirth. Some other stony-faced observers of the myth could do with ribbing, too. Last year, Otto Bathurst’s Hood flopped on to screens in the kind of derivative muddle not seen since Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: ’E’s A Geezah! (Or whatever.)

As with Ridley Scott’s 2010 Hood, Bathurst’s stress on origins succeeded in little beyond spotlighting the ongoing influence of Batman Begins. Light on charm, heavy on machismo, it also arrived too late to ride the post-Katniss YA wave with its lovers’ triangles, dystopian views and cocked bow.

In fairness, other rotten Hoods preceded it. Duds range from Hammer’s dry-as-wood A Challenge For Robin Hood (1967) to self-serious BBC revisit The Legend Of Robin Hood (1975), where Hood is poisoned to death. And Scott’s Hood proved to be a strenuously heavy-lifting effort even by its director’s standards.

Granted, lighter Hoods are not always preferable. History records aberrations such as Robin Hood Junior (Keith Chegwin starred), Rocket Robin Hood and Mel Brooks’ mirth-starved Men In Tights. And there is room for sober, revisionist takes. Witness the Beeb’s pagan 1984 reinvention or Richard Lester’s autumnal Robin And Marian, in which Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn played aged lovers.

The smart move would be to aim somewhere between fun, adventure and a subtext-charged sense of purpose. A little moral passion wouldn’t go amiss: these days, a storybook hero who robs from the rich to give to the poor could be a hero audiences might welcome. Throw in a goofy campfire song or two and let the merriment begin.

For precedents, consider a cross between Errol Flynn-vintage Hood and the McCarthy-era allegories smuggled into 1955’s Richard Greene-starring

The Adventures Of Robin Hood. Start with Robin already an outlaw (see Hammer’s The Men Of Sherwood Forest, 1954) and you’ve got a premise from which to honour recognisable source material and re-energise it. After all, when 1991’s Prince Of Thieves can still withstand repeat viewings despite a) dodgy geography and b) Bryan Adams, it’s clearly not the character himself who’s at fault. True, not every Hood film can boast Alan Rickman-class (sob) villains. But that’s a good standard for filmmakers to observe if they want to go riding through the glen. KH