Forget the Hood you know

Robin Hood (M, 116 mins) Directed by Otto Bathurst Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★1⁄2

There is a lot to be said for walking in to a cinema with low expectations. Robin Hood is barely in double digits on Rotten Tomatoes so I went to my Wednesday night preview screening ready for another King Arthur-style debacle. Critics. What do they know?

This 2018 Robin Hood opens with a voice-over that tells us to forget every other version we have seen or heard. And I reckon that’s good advice because if you’re expecting to be fondly reminded of the 1938 Errol Flynn film, or the Kevin Costner rendition that was an inexplicable hit in 1991, or any other of the scores of Hoods that have made it to the screen over the last – literally – hundred years, then this Robin Hood probably is a complete abomination. Which is maybe why I kinda liked it.

This telling gives us Robin as a double-crossed son of nobility, back from four-years in Arabia to find his estate has been seized by corrupt local Government, and his beautiful Marion married off to another man.

The city of Nottingham is ruled by a despot, the church exists only to tax and exploit the poor, who are mostly working in the mines outside the city walls.

With the background sketched in, director Otto Bathurst (Peaky Blinders) unfurls the film explicitly as a superhero origin yarn, with more in common with Zorro and Batman Begins than other Hoods.

Taron Egerton (Kingsman)

tones down the wide-boy affectations just enough to be tolerable and passes muster as a disillusioned son of privilege with a chip on his shoulder. As Marion, Eve Hewson (This Must Be the Place, and daughter of U2’s Bono) is a knock-out, turning in a performance that practically screams star-in-the-making. Jamie Foxx dials in an effective Little John, in this telling a disaffected Moorish commander who has followed Robin back to England for reasons that remain murky at best.

Ben Mendelsohn has the great sense to take his Sheriff of Nottingham far away from any comparisons to Alan Rickman’s 1991 reading of the role, and conjures up something akin to Ian McKellen’s Richard the Third. When the moment arrives for Mendelsohn’s one big speech – ‘‘I’ve hated the taste of brandy ever since’’ – he burns the house down. It’s chilling and perhaps a clue that this Robin Hood was once intended to be a far bleaker film.

From an impressively deep bench, Bathurst also calls up Australian comic Tim Minchin as a comic-relief Friar Tuck, and F Murray Abraham as a scabrous cardinal of the church.

Robin Hood is irreverent and spiky. It captures a punkish energy and insouciance that suits the legend perfectly. Bathurst doesn’t hold back from costume and dialogue references to current-day events and people, but neither does he allow his film to stop entertaining us. There are some superb set-pieces, a lot of well choreographed fights and battles, and just enough story to hang it all together. Expecting not much, I walked home happy enough.