HOOD, BAD & UGLY
Filmmakers will get no feather in their caps by mismanaging Sherwood Forest in the newest version of a classic stor y
BRING back the tights!
The latest labored take on the old British legend, “Robin Hood” is little more than a pitch-black war film, complete with rudimentary medieval bombs and blood spatter on the camera lens.
The pastoral green of Sherwood Forest has been replaced with urban soot, and there is not a single feather in a single pointy hat.
Instead, Robin (Taron Egerton) is a killing machine who piles up corpses in the city of Nottingham during medieval times. Trying to be supermodern, the film no longer has Rob live by his “Steal from the rich, give to the poor” mantra either; the hero now hollers, “Redistribution of wealth!,” like he’s a newly elected member of the House.
An origin story, the movie begins with a weighty instruction from Friar Tuck (Tim Minchin) to the audience. “Forget history,” he says. “Forget what you think you know. Forget what you’ve heard before.” A k a, forget Errol Flynn and the many far better Robin Hoods you’ve surely seen.
In this version, Lord Robin of Loxley is drafted to fight in the Crusades. So, off to Arabia he goes for some battle scenes that resemble “Call of Duty.” Four years later, he returns to find his manor destroyed by the evil Sheriff of Nottingham, his girlfriend — the staid Marian (Eve Hewson) — dating another dude, and the whole town thinks he’s dead. Time to exact revenge! Joining him on his at-home crusade is Little John (Jamie Foxx), an Arab soldier who stowed away to England in order to avenge the death of his son by helping Robin take down the ruling class of Nottingham. His rationale makes no sense and is almost never referenced again.
John does provide the movie’s most unintentionally funny scene: a training montage, in which he has Robin lift two wagon wheels like they’re a barbell. Things only get rockier from there.
The cast is uniformly terrible. Jamie Dornan (“Fifty Shades of Grey”) plays Marian’s new beau about as well as he played Christian Grey. Egerton, terrific in the “Kingsman” series, is bland here. Most upsetting, the film features two Best Actor Oscar winners: Foxx (“Ray”), who growls and snarls, and F. Murray Abraham (“Amadeus”) as a throwaway Catholic cardinal. A true Robin Hood would steal these actors from this movie and give them to worthier projects.
This isn’t the first time somebody has tried to probe the dark recesses of this should-becharming action story. The 2010 film with Russell Crowe did it too, but at least that movie tried to approximate the time period. In director Otto Bathurst’s new “Hood,” Nottingham looks like a Roman fortress where everybody shops at Zara.