Robin Hood (2018)
Directed by Otto Bathurst
Written by Ben Chandler, David James Kelly
Starring Taron Egerton, Jamie Foxx, Ben Mendelsohn, Eve Hewson, Jamie Dornan
Release Date November 21st, 2018
Published November 20th, 2018
Robin Hood is among the most ill-conceived blockbuster action movies in history. The attempt by Hollywood to sex up and modernize the Robin Hood legend is sad and desperate instead of new and cool. Director Otto Bathurst, a veteran of numerous popular TV shows, botches Robin Hood so badly you're left to wonder if it was intended as serious or as parody. The film is riddled with so many genre cliches that parody feels like a genuine possibility.
We begin just as the crusades are getting underway. Young noble, Lord Robin of Locksley (Taron Egerton) is madly in love with a peasant girl named Marion (Eve Hewson). Their love affair is interrupted when Robin is drafted into the Crusades by the evil Sheriff of Nottingham (Ben Mendelsohn). He leaves and finds himself somewhere in the Middle East where the film becomes a straight up, modern war movie.
This sequence is laughable with arrows that destroy walls more effectively than most bullets and fly at a rate that only cartoon arrows have ever flown before. Cartoon is an appropriate metaphor here because the arrows are a laughable example of bad CGI. Here, Robin Hood plays out a sequence that is a remarkable cliche from every modern, Iraq war era war movie. An arrow shooting machine gun has the crusaders pinned down and only Robin can get to him to shut down that arrow gun.
This sequence made me laugh embarrassingly loud. The creators of Robin Hood believe they are bringing Robin Hood into a more modern context but the attempt fails miserably due to the remarkable series of incongruencies and anachronisms. On top of this, the idea that Robin was ‘drafted’ ruins the idea of Robin as a noble man disillusioned by what he thought was a just war. Instead, you just have Robin as a bratty dilettante who happens to be the only Englishman with a conscience. Here the movie tries to be a Vietnam movie and once again, I was embarrassed for myself laughing and for the actors selling this nonsense.
During this sequence Robin meets John (Jamie Foxx), a middle eastern fighter who sees Robin as someone in a position of privilege that could be to his advantage. Stowing away on the ship taking an injured Robin back to England, John seeks out Robin and unfolds the plot. They will train and become thieves and steal the fortune of the Sheriff of Nottingham, disrupting the funds needed to continue the Crusades.
In his time away, the Sheriff has condemned and burned Robin’s home and announced him as having been killed in the war. Because of this, Marion has left and moved on and is now in a relationship with WIll Scarlett (Jamie Dornan). Marion is also secretly conspiring with Friar Tuck to uncover a piece of information that will take down the Sheriff and his supporters among the corrupt Church of England.
Could any of this nonsense have worked? Maybe, there are a lot of elements in play, plenty of complexities that could be explored. Sadly, the script for Robin Hood is so dopey that it botches everything from beginning to end. There is a conspiracy plot at the center of the movie involving the Church and the Sheriff and it’s all complete nonsense. There is a plot involving stealing documents that then play no role whatsoever in how the story plays out.
The documents prove a plot that the sheriff is involved in but he’s already robbing and killing the people of Nottingham. Do they really need a conspiracy to want to stand against him? The unneeded nonsense piled into this story only serves to drag things out in remarkably ill-conceived. At one point a character played by the wonderful F. Murray Abraham arrives and appears solely so that he can help Ben Mendelsohn deliver one of the dumbest talking killer monologues in the history of talking killer monologues.
Because the script is so incredibly dumb and the plot is so remarkably convoluted, the actors are rendered silly throughout. The cast carries out actions that are mostly nonsensical, as if the plot were being written and rewritten mid-scene and all they can do is try to minimize how confused they appear to be. Poor Eve Hewson is the most let down by the nonsense script as Marion appears capably inept, able to steal useless information and just as quickly deliver dialogue dismissing the importance of what she just risked her life to steal.
I must mention the anachronistic costumes as well. Wow! Leather bars don’t have leather as lovely and durable as they had in the era of The Crusades, several hundred years before leather was even invented. The sheriff wears a gray leather duster that I am pretty sure you could buy at a store for well over a thousand dollars. I realize that the suspension of disbelief is required but the modern touches brought to this story are never justified.
Set the film in an alternate universe, include magic or monsters, or make it a fairy tale universe, do something to establish a universe where the ludicrous anachronisms aren’t so silly looking. The filmmakers do nothing to make this a believable period in human history and yet it uses history, i.e the Crusades as a touchstone. I am being unnecessarily pedantic about something as dimwitted as Robin Hood but I am trying to contextualize my reaction to this movie which was repeated, embarrassed giggles.
These giggles were not intended. The movie doesn’t want to be laughed at but I couldn't help myself. The laughable script, the awful CGI, the ludicrously faux cool costumes made me repeatedly burst into giggles I found hard to stifle. I was laughing at the movie and not with it and it was not fun. I didn’t go to this movie to laugh, I wanted it to be the adventure that the marketing promised but no, it’s just all so terrible, so hysterically terrible.
