It’s Robin Hoodie!
FORGET history, pleads Taron Egerton in the introductory voice-over to Robin Hood. “Forget what you think you know.” I tried but I failed. After seeing the medieval outlaw swan around in a muscle T-shirt, dodge bolts from a machine crossbow and play olde worlde roulette, I started missing the men in tights.
If this was a Mel Brooks parody, these glaring anachronisms would have served a purpose. But it’s painfully clear director Otto Bathurst isn’t aiming for laughs.
Instead, the 47-year-old has unmoored the folktale from history so he can refashion it to appeal to what he thinks are the attention spans of the modern teenager. The results are every bit as patronising as that sounds.
Here “Rob” of Loxley (Egerton) is a rich young toff who receives a handwritten draft notice summoning him to fight in the Crusades. In Arabia, we see him sporting a medieval version of the flak jacket as his “unit” of bow-wielding soldiers raid a guerrilla base, a sequence that brings to mind video game Call Of Duty.
When his commander Gisborne (Paul Anderson) begins torturing captives, big-hearted Rob tries to protect a young Moor but is shot in the chest and sent back to his home city.
Forget the landlocked Nottingham
“you think you know”. Here it is a sunny, coastal city packed with gleaming spires and grand stone halls. It looks like King’s Landing from fantasy series Game Of Thrones and that is because Bathurst has shamelessly ripped it off. Like Westeros, his Nottingham is another CGI-enhanced Dubrovnik.
There he is reunited with Jamie Foxx’s Moorish commander John (they have dropped the “Little”). Average-sized John has stowed away on an English ship to wreak mayhem in Nottingham, which apparently is the “bank and the beating heart” of the Pope’s Crusades.
Pay attention during Foxx’s clunky speech where he details why he and Rob should start a global revolution from the East Midlands. It is the only time when the script tries to makes sense of its own plot.
However while Rob was fighting in the war, his girlfriend Marian (Eve Hewson) saw his name on a list of “fallen soldiers” and started dating working-class politician Will Scarlett (Jamie Dornan), a medieval Jeremy Corbyn with a lot on his plate.
Meanwhile Nottingham’s coal industry may be centuries away but the city streets are packed with disgruntled miners. Their oppressor is the evil Sheriff of Nottingham (Ben Mendelsohn) who, forgetting that this is feudal England, has been out canvassing for support for his war taxes.
Under Foxx’s tutelage, Rob plays the rich playboy by day but by night becomes a masked avenger called The Hood who can somersault in the air while firing multiple arrows in slow motion.
Will teenagers take to this medieval Batman? I suspect they know there’s nothing more embarrassing than a middleaged man desperate to get down with the kids. Robin Hood is the cinematic equivalent of William Hague wearing a baseball cap.
David Fincher’s The Girl With The
Dragon Tattoo was one of those rare Hollywood adaptations that stayed true to the spirit of the novel. It was the first US reworking of Stieg Larsson’s intense thriller about tortured Swedish computer hacker Lisbeth Salander.
Sadly normal service has resumed with The Girl In The Spider’s Web, an espionage movie that owes more to the Bond series than to Nordic noir. Claire Foy definitely looks and sounds the part (she delivers her lines in a subtle and convincing Scandinavian lilt) but she has a lot less acting to do than her predecessors.
Rooney Mara, who starred in Fincher’s film, and Noomi Rapace from the Swedish adaptations of
Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, showed us a damaged young woman who was seeking retribution while coping with a deep psychological trauma. In this film, based on the first of two follow-ups by David Lagercrantz (Larsson died after completing the trilogy in 2004), Foy’s
Lisbeth is too busy running around Stockholm fighting villains to do any soul-searching. This time the labyrinthine plot begins with a simple phone call. Computer expert Frans Balder (Stephen Merchant making no attempt to hide his Bristol accent) has somehow got hold of the number of mysterious hacker Lisbeth who is on the run from the police.
Frans has written a program for the US National Security Agency that can access the codes of every nuclear weapon on Earth. Now (perhaps after reading Trump’s latest Twitter rant) he has decided it may not be in the safest hands and wants Lisbeth to steal it so he can destroy it.
When Lisbeth takes the job, she finds herself caught in a tangled web involving a blond hitman (Claes Bang), a shadowy Swedish spy (Synnøve Macody Lund), a US hacker-turned agent (Lakeith Stanfield), and her evil estranged sister (Sylvia Hoeks).
This time her journalist partner Mikael Blomkvist (Sverrir Gudnason) feels a little redundant but director Fede Alvarez delivers some slick action scenes and keeps us guessing with some very clever twists.
The film is entertaining but wildly preposterous. Not only does Lisbeth’s mobile take calls from terrified computer experts but it also allows her to open prison doors, take over CCTV cameras and hijack speeding cars. I don’t know what model her phone is but I’d love to visit its App Store.
THE CANNES jury has made some bizarre decisions over the decades but this year the Palme D’Or definitely went to the right film. Shoplifters, from Japanese writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda, is not your typical awards winner. It is a touching and at times sentimental film that generously allows its actors to bask in the limelight.
We begin with an introduction to Osamu (Lily Franky), a sort of Japanese Fagin who is shoplifting with son Shota (Jyo Kairi).
When we get back to his Tokyo home, we meet the rest of his clan – his wife Nobuyo (Sakuro Ando), his mother Hatsue (Kirin Kiki) and his teenage daughter Aki (Mayu Matsuoka) who does her bit for the family with her work as a peep show “model”.
The house becomes even more crowded when Osamu “adopts” a homeless toddler whom he met on the streets.
The joy of this film comes from hanging out with this lively if wildly dysfunctional family. It’s beautifully shot and powerfully performed but the languorous pace is deceptive. It turns out Kore-eda has some powerful twists up his sleeve.