When I saw "Robin Hood" in the cinema during the summer, I started eagerly scouting for the dots in the corner of the screen that signify the changing of film reels. That's how bored I was with the film.
Now, I'll add that I'm a fan of the Robin Hood legend. Equally, I appreciate Ridley Scott greatly, and think that some of his films are fantastic. I also appreciated the visual beauty of the film itself, and the fact that it showed Robin's world as plague-ridden Medieval Europe was probably more engaging than the usual nostalgic vision as seen in, say, the Errol Flynn film. So I kept asking myself: how could this film end up being so bad? It's easily one of the dullest and most uninteresting films I have ever seen in my life.
Part of me wants to give Russell Crowe the blame. I'm not exactly a fan of him to start, but here he gives Robin around ten different regional accents from across the British Isles over the course of the film, which is certainly distracting. I can't see how anyone would let that slip, especially in such a big budget production in this day and age, and it hardly does much to promote Crowe as an actor. But even then, a mishap with the main character's voice shouldn't excuse his overwhelmingly dull characterisation, a practical cypher with zero charisma.
Nor should it excuse the boringness of the other characters or the lack of an engaging plot, which is a rambling story of royal intrigue and deception set around the time of the Magna Carta's signing and continued bad relations between the medieval kingdoms of France and England (in truth, the film is a sort of prequel, sort of loose adaptation). What makes the traditional Robin Hood story so great is that, like all the great legends, fairy tales and myths, it speaks to raw human emotions, and doesn't need to be made into a deep discourse on medieval politics. The original legend has always been undeniably simple, but it was an engaging story of human liberty and wealth, and of the sacrifices some make to help the less fortunate and to vanquish the oppressors.
Call me a primal simpleton, but what made every other major production of the story so effective, from Errol Flynn's 1938 film to Disney's animated farce, was that it didn't deny itself as being much more than a simplistic story of the struggle between good and evil in a corrupt society. By letting it follow Hollywood's in-vogue trend of "deconstructing, reconstructing and re-imagining" classics without totally considering the spirit of the original, and by trying to make the characters "grey" (though ultimately not sharply developed), the film basically becomes not much more than a cold yarn of royal intrigue and confusion among nobility, undeniably missing the point of the original legend and what made it so winning, or any other traditional story for that matter. As such, the film is a complete disappointment.
Now, I'll add that I'm a fan of the Robin Hood legend. Equally, I appreciate Ridley Scott greatly, and think that some of his films are fantastic. I also appreciated the visual beauty of the film itself, and the fact that it showed Robin's world as plague-ridden Medieval Europe was probably more engaging than the usual nostalgic vision as seen in, say, the Errol Flynn film. So I kept asking myself: how could this film end up being so bad? It's easily one of the dullest and most uninteresting films I have ever seen in my life.
Part of me wants to give Russell Crowe the blame. I'm not exactly a fan of him to start, but here he gives Robin around ten different regional accents from across the British Isles over the course of the film, which is certainly distracting. I can't see how anyone would let that slip, especially in such a big budget production in this day and age, and it hardly does much to promote Crowe as an actor. But even then, a mishap with the main character's voice shouldn't excuse his overwhelmingly dull characterisation, a practical cypher with zero charisma.
Nor should it excuse the boringness of the other characters or the lack of an engaging plot, which is a rambling story of royal intrigue and deception set around the time of the Magna Carta's signing and continued bad relations between the medieval kingdoms of France and England (in truth, the film is a sort of prequel, sort of loose adaptation). What makes the traditional Robin Hood story so great is that, like all the great legends, fairy tales and myths, it speaks to raw human emotions, and doesn't need to be made into a deep discourse on medieval politics. The original legend has always been undeniably simple, but it was an engaging story of human liberty and wealth, and of the sacrifices some make to help the less fortunate and to vanquish the oppressors.
Call me a primal simpleton, but what made every other major production of the story so effective, from Errol Flynn's 1938 film to Disney's animated farce, was that it didn't deny itself as being much more than a simplistic story of the struggle between good and evil in a corrupt society. By letting it follow Hollywood's in-vogue trend of "deconstructing, reconstructing and re-imagining" classics without totally considering the spirit of the original, and by trying to make the characters "grey" (though ultimately not sharply developed), the film basically becomes not much more than a cold yarn of royal intrigue and confusion among nobility, undeniably missing the point of the original legend and what made it so winning, or any other traditional story for that matter. As such, the film is a complete disappointment.