Merry? Not very
Hollywood’s latest take on Robin Hood misses the target — by a very wide margin
At a recent preview screening of Robin Hood, some 400 cinemagoers and critics each gave two hours of their lives to director Otto Bathurst and his cast of merry men (and a couple of women). All told, that’s about one collective month of time spent watching an ill-written, miscast, miserably performed, historically inaccurate story that cost an estimated $90 million to make. So there you have it: Robin Hood steals from the poor and gives to the rich.
Taron Egerton stars as Robin of Loxley. You may remember the actor as Eggsy from the Kingsman movies, schooled in the ways of warfare by an older mentor (played there by Colin Firth), then called upon to right a devious wrong. Well, that’s basically him in this one too. The mentor is John (Jamie Foxx), whom he meets after being drafted into fighting the Third Crusade. That would make the time frame of Robin Hood about AD 1190 or so. But an unseen narrator in the opening scene tells us he “can’t remember” what year it was, and to “forget history.” It’s useful advice, and has the benefit of making it easier to accept armour-piercing, stone-shattering, rapid-firing crossbow bolts, Molotov cocktails and the RPA, or rocket-propelled arrow. Robin isn’t the only character draped in anachronism. Marian, played by Eve Hewson, flutters through every scene in what appears to be the latest L’Oréal products. And it’s a good thing she’s using chemistry on her skin, because there’s none between her and Robin. For comic relief, we get Australian comedian-musician Tim Minchin as Friar Tuck, clearly forgetting the Fourth Commandment of cinema, Thou Shalt Not Overact. But my favourite is Ben Mendelsohn as the Sheriff of Nottingham, yet another sneering bad-guy role from the man who played Sorrento in Ready Player One and will appear as Talos in
the upcoming Captain Marvel. You may also recognize him from Rogue One, not least because both characters are dressed in the same Third Reich-inspired high-collared jackets.
The plot is as straight as an arrow, though not as sharp. After falling for Marian — not sure about “maid” or even “marital status” — Robin heads off to Arabia for four years. When he gets back, the Sheriff has proclaimed him dead and ransacked his estate, and Marian has moved on to Will Scarlet (Jamie Dornan). Robin and John decide to harass the sheriff and “follow the money” — apologies to the late William Goldman, who popularized that phrase in All the President’s Men. Foxx, by the way, is clearly better than the material, and he knows it; Robin practically fades into the background in each scene they share. Caught between Robin and the Sheriff are the ragtag residents of Nottingham, most of them working an underground mine of we’re-never-told-what. I’m going to guess it’s a rich vein of irony. Eventually the outlaw forces uncover some kind of collusion between the Church of Rome and a foreign government. It doesn’t make any logical sense, but seems to have been included to give Robin Hood more modernday relevance, as if the Trumpian stump speech by the sheriff, and the street battle shot like a G7 riot, weren’t enough. But by this point you may have stopped caring and would just like the whole thing to be over.
That may be easier said than done, however, as the final scene sets up — perhaps “threatens” is a better word — the possibility of a sequel. So the men of Robin Hood may be merry, but the ending is anything but.