Russell Crowe was interviewed on Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo's BBC radio show last week and said that Scott wanted to make a new film about Robin Hood because it was ripe for reinvention: once Mel Brooks has made a parody of a particular genre or story, you know it's time to move on. Which is fair enough, I suppose, except that the tale of Robin Hood has been reinvented so many times already...
... there can't be many places left to go with it. Still Ridley Scott, being the cinematic genius he is, has found a new direction which nobody else has dared attempt. He's turned the classic tale of Robin Hood into a cock-eyed shambles.
It's a bold move, and sure to be controversial. Russell Crowe does his part with a remarkably incompetent attempt at a "regional" English accent which meanders quite happily across the Irish Sea and back again several times in each sentence. He and Cate Blanchett also somehow manage to take one of the great historical romances and sap all life out of it. The dramatically pivotal moment when Robin says the line "I love you, Marian", he may as well have been talking to his horse. The rest of the cast isn't bad, but so uninspiring there's nothing much to say about it.
The big problem is just that the film flails about all over the place, perhaps because three writers, three producers (including Crowe) and four executive producers is waaaay too many cooks in the kitchen. I won't be spoiling anything if I say that Robin Hood isn't actually declared an outlaw until the last five minutes of the film; in fact I'll be sparing you the agony of spending two hours wondering when the real story is going to start.
See, I always thought that the story of Robin Hood was about an outlaw who lived in a forest and stole from the rich to give to the poor in the face of tyranny. Very simple, very iconic, which is why it's always been so popular.
Ridley Scott thinks that the story of Robin Hood is about some common archer called Robin Longstride who fought in Richard the Lionheart's army, got put in the stocks, then escaped and pretended to be a knight in order to get back to England to fulfill the dying wish of Sir Robin of Loxley that he return his sword to his estranged father in Nottingham, who then decides to pretend that Robin Longstride is his son, even though he looks nothing like his son, largely in order to contrive some narrative excuse for romantic awkwardness between Robin Longstride and Robin of Loxley's widow, Maid Marian (who isn't a maid at all, since she is a widow), and by some moronic coincidence it turns out that Robin of Loxley's father actually knew Robin Longstride's father, whom Robin Longstride has forgotten about, and says that he was a political visionary who wanted common rights for all men, then Robin Longstride (still pretending to be Robin of Loxley, mind) has some flashbacks in which he remembers the murder of his father by a bunch of soldiers and realises that he is from Barnsdale, and decides to become a great general and hero of the common man by shouting at King John, who then promises to sign the Magna Carta if they all join him to defeat the French invasion, which they do, but then all the people cheer Robin Longstride (who at some point has gone back to his true identity) instead of him, so he gets mad and refuses to sign the Magna Carta after all and declares Robin Longstride an outlaw. Then, just as it starts to get interesting, the film ends.
Basically you pay to watch 140 minutes of exposition. But there's plenty of additional retardation thrown in to keep you exasperated and/or amused.
1) Robin Longstride and his boring bunch of wanker friends decide to pass themselves off as knights after Robin says, "There's is no difference between a knight and an ordinary man except the clothes he wears." Now I'm sorry, but no. It worked in A Knight's Tale because that was a comedy. In this film it is just dumb. For one thing, the knights whose clothes they steal were Anglo-Normans and would have spoken French. Could a modern English yokel pass himself off as a member of the French elite by donning a beret? I think not.
2) British people laughed at Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves because the film had Kevin Costner land at Dover and walk in one day to Nottingham via Hadrian's Wall. In this film, an entire fucking army gallops non-stop from Nottingham to the south coast via what looks like the Lake District or Snowdonia.
3) The beach set-piece battle at the end is stupid. Having hundreds of horsemen charging through the surf looks impressive in the trailer, I admit. But really, the battle is such an obvious attempt to make a medieval version of Saving Private Ryan's D-Day scene that I was laughing through most of it. They have the same frenetic, handheld style, the same blue-grey washed out colouring, even some shots are almost identical, except with bows and arrows instead of machine guns.
French coast, 1944
English coast, 1199
It's a pity, because a couple of weeks ago I went to see a largely ignored historical film by Alejandro Amenabar (director of The Others) called Agora, starring Rachel Weisz. It was a dramatisation of the life of Hypatia, who was a pagan female philosopher in Alexandria at the end of the fourth century, a time when it was a bad idea to be a pagan female philosopher anywhere. The film chronicled her earnest pursuit of reason and scientific truth while the world around her was being torn apart by bloody street fighting between pagan mobs and militant Christian monks.
Agora was trying to be intelligent and interesting, and mostly managed to do both. It also had something useful to say about the nature of religious conflict. It got a mixed reception because critics thought it was too highbrow, which it wasn't, provided that when you go to the cinema you're prepared to have one or two brain cells excited instead of having all ten billion numbed into oblivion by explosions and punches and stabbings and penis jokes. All of which Robin Hood has in abundance. Thanks, Ridley, for lowering the collective IQ of western civilisation another couple of points.
