Sometimes you have a couple of ideas and you want to mash them up and it seems like it’ll be cool. Then it turns out that it was a terrible idea. Just ask George Lucas about the Star Wars prequels, which tried to be space fantasy and an essay on the decay of democracy and rise of fascism (prescient but terrible). It maybe could have worked, I can almost see the movie(s) where it would have. Robin Hood is exactly like that. It wants to be a pseudo-medieval action movie and an essay on vaguely contemporary British politics (including wars abroad, wealth inequality, and anti-immigration sentiment). And again, I can almost see the movie that would have managed to make these ideas work together.
But this isn’t it.
There’s something like two-dozen movies about Robin Hood going back to fucking 1908. I’ve seen my fair share and this one is the worst of them all. Which is a feat considering it hasn’t even been 10 years since the last one and that one was pretty bad too.
Why is this one so bad? Well, for one thing it’s a rip-off of The Dark Knight. To a pretty stunning extent. But people have talked about that. More essential is that it’s functionally a superhero movie, but can’t decide whether it’s grim and gritty (like Nolan’s Batman films) or a more swash-buckling throwback. It kind of tries to be both, sometimes within the same scene, and the result is jarring at best. It’s also very, very stupid. And not in the fun way, where charm is either the result or the thing that gets it over. Robin Hood has no charm, just a bunch of poorly motivated set-pieces where the fairly competent action is too often ruined by over-the-top special effects and sequences over-edited and over-designed to the point where all cohesion is basically lost. The story is fundamentally confused about its own themes and sources of inspiration. Plus, the production design is just a mess.
Insert clumsy parallels here.
Robin of Loxley (Taron Egerton) is drafted into service just as he’s settling down with Marian (Eve Hewson), the love of his life. He goes to the Crusades and finds them to be basically like Fallujah fifteen or so years ago. He and his squad fight with longbows the way contemporary soldiers would with rifles. The parallel is obvious here and continues into the scenes of abuse that suggest the Crusaders are hardly the good guys (the movie’s plot shies away from this idea later, of course). These scenes almost work, but they do feel very on the nose and utterly ahistorical. Later, when it’s revealed that the Sheriff of Nottingham (Ben Mendelsohn) and a Cardinal (F. Murray Abram) are funneling the money to “Arabian” generals and are therefore traitors, the movie forgets any shred of sympathy that it had for the “enemy” — and it really was just a shred. I get the point that the Sheriff is supposed to be a reactionary demagogue stoking the fires of anti-immigration and xenophobia while making money off war profiteering and the side economy of war. Very relevant, movie. But like… stick to it long enough to actually say something because otherwise you’re just surfing on topicality and iconography in your lazy quest to worship the rule of cool.
In the sense that it’s a movie about a possible historical but mostly mythological figure, Robin Hood is basically like King Arthur: Legend of the Sword but without all the fun “fuck you, this is fantasy” stuff. It probably uses more superhero tropes than that one, but I could almost believe their aesthetic and conceptual similarities were intentional. Someone trying to start another cinematic universe? Its version of the middle ages is completely fantastical and occasionally absurd even within the confines of its own world-building. It’s more about showing how serious and politically relevant it is than trying to be fun, which effectively saps the movie of any fun even when it’s desperately trying to land a one-liner or get the blood pumping with a chase. A lot of it feels like an afterthought. Robin is basically indestructible, recovering from arrows in the chest, the thigh, the tum-tum, whatever just as soon as they are wrenched from his hard bod. I mean, bleeding to death or dying of infection just doesn’t happen to heroes, amirite?
They went for a Lars Anderson kind of thing with the archery, which actually fits in fittingly preposterous way.
Robin meets John (Jamie Foxx), a warrior whose son Robin tries to save. Stalking him all the way back to England, John recruits Robin to steal from the rich assholes who fund the Crusades. Shortly after, the movie undercuts the presence of its own supporting PoC character by doing a cringey “I can’t pronounce your name” bit. Eventually, other pieces of the Robin mythos fall into place. Maid Marian shows up and is one of the best parts of the movie, frankly. She gets a lot to do and is probably the closest thing the movie has to a true north conscience. The mechanics of the love triangle are characteristically muddled and feel lazy, but her character generally works in spite of the movie. There’s a version of Will Scarlett (Jamie Dornan) and of Friar Tuck (Tim Minchin). The Sheriff is played by Ben Mendelsohn, which is a shame. Mendelsohn is so fucking good (in a kind of boring way here) and he keeps popping up in movies exactly like this one. Rogue One could swap out the character he played there with this dude and nothing would be lost. To a lesser extent, the same applies to Ready Player One. I get that he feels like a bad guy, Hollywood, but give it a fucking rest with this particular type of bad guy. Please?
So Robin thieves and the sheriff gets mad. It all eventually culminates in a big battle where Robin gives himself up for absolutely no reason. And I’m serious. That scene is bafflingly stupid. Why would revealing himself stop the miners and riot cops from fighting? What’s the logic there? There are no merry men because this is an origin story in what the studio (hilariously wrong) figured was going to be a franchise or cinematic universe. The merry men are introduced, at least a couple of ’em, and the movie ends with basically the “beginning” of the actual myths. So what if it doesn’t really make sense along the way? We’re here to watch a dude shoot three CG arrows in a second, right?
Wipe that grin off your face, Jamie Foxx! This is a bad movie and you know it.
The production design being a mess is something I said above. Rumor is that they wanted the movie to feel partially contemporary and partially authentic. It doesn’t really feel like either, more like a Game of Thrones also-ran with shades of generic quasi-medieval bullshit like the crossbow-guns and so on. I liked some of the costumes and individual bits of design, but they don’t cohere very well. Even the aesthetics of Nottingham make no sense, since it’s half a CG creation and half Croatian historical buildings. The architecture screams Mediterranean but we’re supposed to believe it’s England. Looks more like King’s Landing, and this is not an accident at all. The problem I have, which might be pedantic given that this movie barely pretends to take place in a realistic world, is that they insist on calling this shit “England”. There’s no sense of place here. As a criticism, it might make more sense to just point out what movies like this do versus what The Lord of the Rings trilogy did. Like with King Arthur, it just feels ten times dumber than it needs to be. Especially when it’s just as easy to transplant a myth like these examples to a truly fantastical setting if you want to. Now, instead, we’re going to have kids running around thinking they had riot shields and ballistic masks in 13th Century England.
That might all be kinds of nitpicky, for sure. Not everyone is bothered by aesthetic choices or the particulars of how a movie adapts mythology or history. I’ve liked as many movies that take “bold” directions with the same ingredients, so it isn’t that. I like the Pirates of the Caribbean movies (the first three at least) and they pretend to be in a real-ish world while being unabashedly fantastical, too. They also don’t really try to be gritty parallels to contemporary politics, though. Anyway, I didn’t need a more grounded, historically valid Robin Hood. Ridley Scott kind of tried that and it sucked too, after all. But I do want some fucking consistency. Even King Arthur was consistently insane. So my real issue might just be boiled down to the movie failing to make me believe in its world and as a result, in its characters and their story.
Maybe don’t fire your agent, but have a stern talk?
The end of the movie, which I mentioned is kind of the end of a typically misguided “origin story” chapter, also has the problem of not making much sense. Let’s take Will Scarlett, who is here a leader of the miners, a kind of labor organizer with larger political ambitions. When Marian confronts him about the cost to actual people and Robin gives him a “seat at the table”, he joins up and leads his riotous mob into glorious battle with the cops (complete with riot shields, firebombs, and all the usual iconography). Later, he sees Marian and Robin kissing and gets really tilted. Once the old Sheriff is dead, he becomes the new one so that the circle stays unbroken. Not only is this a really cheap way to effectively end the movie at the beginning of the story (all the rage these days), it makes little sense that he’d suffer no consequences for his sedition. It’s not like many, many cops didn’t see him fighting on the side of the “rebels”. On top of all that, he’s all burnt in the face just like a certain Aaron Eckhart character we know and (some of us) love. It all feels very slapped together and lazy. Not to mention brazen in its “borrowing”.
This leaves my last, but not least, critique: the muddled and embarrassing way that the movie handles its themes of class warfare and wealth inequality. Nolan’s Batman films strike me as a really odd place to find inspiration since they have pretty much the opposite ethos. Those movies are about a libertarian/objectivist superhero and in the third film, to which this one owes a major debt just in terms of how the action is staged, it’s the common folk who must be opposed by the noble police (dependable guard dogs for capital), their own Robin Hood figure (Catwoman) and finally by Batman himself, who alone has the moral integrity and force of will to decide what’s right for all of Gotham. That kind of authoritarianism is echoed partially in Robin Hood, but mostly by the villains. At the same time, the muddling I’m talking about isn’t just in an unfortunate inspiration, but in the script itself. At one point Marian quotes Ronald Reagan for fuck’s sake. Champion of the common folk, that guy. And considering this movie’s seeming position on Thatcherism, having one of the heroes quoting maybe his closest ideological ally strikes me as plainly bizarre.
McCoyed 