Petty thievery
There is one thing that the new iteration of “Robin Hood” does better than anything I’ve seen this year. Its opening scene immediately, and effectively, sets up the thesis for the rest of the film to come. And the film that is to come is terrible.
“Forget history, forget what you believe, forget what you know,” we’re urged by the hooded crusader himself. Except, he is not the Robin Hood of legend at the beginning of the film. He is, instead, a young, somewhat pugnacious, rich rascal. He’s drafted to fight in the Crusades and returns home a changed man, ready to…Well, I’m not quite sure actually because the film itself isn’t quite sure. The opening sets the film up as different from the tired old history, as a new and improved and much more eclectic “Robin Hood” and although it falters on the improvement quotient, it is definitely different. “Robin Hood” riffs on a number of genres and a number of films but the amalgamation of things that constitute its two-hour runtime are wholly its own. There’s nothing quite like it. Nothing could quite have prepared me for it. And nothing could have prepared me for my visceral dislike.
It would be simple to argue that the film’s general ignorance (wilful or deliberate, it’s uncertain) of geography, history, physics and politics signals its doom but this is not quite so. Anachronisms in film are as old as the medium itself. Rather, the film’s descent into mindless folly amidst an incessant visual freneticism is most marked in its inability to commit to anything. It’s a manifestation of the unsettled quality that has come to mark a great deal of modern blockbusters–a relentless onslaught of things. The film is shouting at us, whether it is in the battle sequences where arrows land with the velocity of bullets, whether it’s in scenes where characters bellow at each other for reasons unbeknownst to us—or them—or whether it’s in the murk ugliness of a final battle scene that is visually confusing. It’s first impulse is to jolt us so that we forget what just happened and cannot anticipate what will happen. And this is because the film itself has no interest in the present or in the now.
It’s no surprise that the film ends on a note of another story beginning. This is a prequel to the real story, because why not? We are expected to be waiting in anticipation of the sequel except “Robin Hood,” in its constant looking towards the future, forgets to establish the stakes of the now. For a film that bills itself as an action thriller, it is defiantly original in being markedly lacking in suspense or stakes.