No Hood-winking bold Eve
Bono’s girl teams up with Jamie Dornan in this classic tale of robbing from the rich to give to the poor — which ultimately fails to steal the show...
Robin Hood (12A) Verdict: Misses the target The Girl In The Spider’s Web (15A) Verdict: More sticky business
THE spoiler in the case of Robin Hood is the 1938 version of the same folk story, which was superior in every way. ‘Forget what you’ve seen before, forget what you think you know,’ says a hopeful voiceover at the beginning.
Chance would be a fine thing. For the rest of the film, what we’ve seen before stands as a reproach to the nonsense we’re served up here.
Of course, there have been countless cinematic efforts (both before and since Michael Curtiz’s classic The Adventures Of Robin Hood) to tell the story of Sherwood Forest’s stalwart thief.
Some have been more than watchable. But quite why this one was made is anybody’s guess, especially as Nottingham appears to have been relocated to the Balkans. I don’t doubt that England’s East Midlands looked different in the Middle Ages, but I’ll wager fourand-twenty groats that there were no mountains.
The story sees the outlawed aristocrat Robin (Taron Egerton) join forces with a Moor, played by Jamie Foxx (whose tricky Muslim name is anglicised to John), to foment rebellion against the evil Sheriff of Nottingham (Ben Mendelsohn).
There are duly lots of audacious heists, a disappointingly svelte Friar Tuck (Tim Minchin) and heartbreak for Robin as he returns from the Crusades to find that his beloved Marian (Eve Hewson), believing him to be dead, is now shacked up with another dishy rebel, called Will (Jamie Dornan).
The pair were both permitted to keep their Irish accents — from the north and the south which is slightly odd. Even so, they put in decent performances, particularly as it is Hewson’s first major role.
But overall clumsy anachronisms abound, perhaps deliberately, though the film isn’t nearly witty enough to carry them off.
Robin talks pure Estuary English while sporting a quilted anorak with a hoodie that wouldn’t look out of place in a Jack Wills window, and director Otto Bathurst tosses in a few Molotov cocktails, a millennium or so before Molotov. So if you do yearn for a spot of robbing the rich to give to the poor this weekend, do yourself a favour, and sit down with Errol Flynn & Co. instead. ÷Honestly, you’d think Claire Foy might have worked harder to avoid being typecast.
After glittering in Netflix series The Crown as Queen Elizabeth II — Lilibet to her nearest and dearest — here she is playing Her Majesty’s near-namesake, Lisbeth, in The Girl In The Spider’s Web. Admittedly, this Lisbeth is a humourless, hard-knock, chainsmoking lesbian with a nose ring and a massive dragon tattoo on her
back, from whom you wouldn’t want a tap on the shoulder with a s ceremonial sword just in case she I got the sudden urge to decapitate n you and drop-kick your head into a wheelie-bin. But still, another Lisbeth. How . unimaginative. This one, Lisbeth a Salander, is the avenging angel g created by the late Stieg Larsson — although the film is based on r the first of the so-called Millennium series of novels to be written after Larsson’s death, by David Lagercrantz.In the previous movie adaptations, our fearsome heroine was played first by Noomi Rapace and then Rooney Mara.
But Foy is the first British actress to take the role, and if ever there was a feature-length audition for a woman to be the next James Bond, this is it.
There’s even a fiendish and distinctly Bond-like plot to hack into the world’s nuclear defence systems, a cyber-attack which nobody but Salander can foil, albeit with the help of a prodigiously gifted child called August (Christopher Convery), whose boffin father, Frans, is played by Stephen Merchant.
It’s not entirely clear where Frans is meant to come from, incidentally, but it’s almost certainly not the suburbs of Bristol. Yet Merchant’s rolling Bristolian vowels remain intact, while Foy treats us to a Swedish accent as heavy and unwieldy as a flat-pack Ikea wardrobe.
There she is in the foreground sounding like ABBA’s Anni-Frid, while a Swedish TV reporter in the background sounds like ITN’s Anna Ford.
All I ask for is consistency but never mind. Whatever the loose state of her vowels, if Salander is to save the world she must first save herself, which she does by diving into a bath to escape an inferno.
She also eludes her pursuers by riding a motorbike across a frozen lake, dodges no end of machinegun bullets and is more computersavvy than everyone in Silicon Valley put together. She has a penchant for leggy blondes, too, making her more 007 than 007.
Or she would be, if she weren’t also a firebrand feminist on a mission to string up every abusive man by the you-know-whats, her anger stoked by memories of the paedophilic crimes committed on her and her sister by their own father.
Even so, the action skips nimbly from set-piece to set-piece, Foy is terrific even with the dodgy accent and the dialogue is not as leaden as it might be.
One of the screenwriters, along with Jay Basu and director Fede Alvarez, is the estimable Steven Knight, who, long ago, in what must seem like another life entirely, was one of the creators of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?.
Perhaps in homage to the show that made Knight rich, Salander gets to phone a friend, her journalist pal Mikael Blomkvist (Sverrir Gudnason). He’s the one person in Stockholm who knows what makes her tick.
As a thoroughly ludicrous but nevertheless pacy plot unfolds, it turns out there’s another person, even closer to home, who knows what makes her tick. But you’ll get no spoilers here.