Mark Reviews Movies: ROBIN HOOD (2018)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 20, 2018

"Forget what you've seen before," the narrator tells us at the beginning of Robin Hood. It's part of an explicit promise that this interpretation of the legendary thief, who stole from the rich and gave to the poor, will be new and different from the abundant, previous iterations of this tale. If one looks at this version on a purely cosmetic level, the narration is kind of honest.

Really, though, the movie is just another in the long line of Robin Hood narratives, telling us nothing new, while showing the story to us in a slightly more modern way. Many of the movie's most obvious changes have to do with combat. Here, Robin of Loxley (a charming-enough Taron Egerton) stealthily moves with fellow soldiers through the streets of a city in Arabia during the Third Crusade, holding his bow as if it's a reasonable weapon for the sort of close-quarters combat that the following battle demands.

Director Otto Bathurst plays the opening war scenes as if they're combat in a more contemporary era, with a rapid-fire crossbow raining bolts upon Robin and a barrage of boulders from catapults being called in with a flaming arrow. It's all silly and illogical, but it's presented with enough straight-faced seriousness that one starts to question one's reasoning. Maybe such tactics were used in the late 12th century, and they only look quite ridiculous because war itself is absurd. That's probably too much of a reach, especially within the context of this movie.

Robin, having been drafted into the Crusade by order of the Sheriff of Nottingham (Ben Mendelsohn), is shot by his commander and sent home to England after trying to save the son of John (Jamie Foxx), a Muslim soldier captured by Robin's unit.

Upon arriving home, our hero discovers that he was pronounced dead two years into his four-year service. His family estate was given ye olde foreclosure notice and has been seized by the Sheriff. His commoner girlfriend Marian (Eve Hewson) has moved on to a politician named Will (Jamie Dornan). Meanwhile, the whole of Nottingham has been taxed by the Sheriff and the Church into servitude in the local mine.

There is an intriguing twist to the usual setup of this story, and it comes from the depiction of the Sheriff. He is no mere generically evil, mustache-twirling antagonist in this version. Rhetoric and politics are behind his villainy, and they sound eerily familiar to modern ears. Desiring more money for himself and his political connection with the Church, this Sheriff warns the people that they had better pay his war tax, lest the entirety of England be overrun by hordes of foreign invaders, seeking to change the culture of the country.

This uncomfortably relevant angle, which puts this tale in a modern context better than any action sequence, ends almost as soon as it's raised, though. Instead, we get to watch an extended montage of Robin training with John, who stowed away on the ship bringing the hero home, and the development of the usual plot to undo the main villains. The Sheriff and his cohorts have already stolen from the people. Now, John says, it's time to hit them in the wallet—the only place where it hurts them. After all, it's not really stealing if the money was already stolen.

The rest of the movie follows the familiar course of the story, only with its politics and its side players greatly reduced in favor of a lot of action. Robin puts on a smiling face for the Sheriff, but he puts on a scarf and a hood to rob from assorted tax-collecting and -holding locations. Most of the action is chaotic and frenzied (A chase with lots of random flames and sparks is the most ludicrous of it), with Robin holding multiple arrows in his bow and firing them off with little hesitation. Anonymous bad guys fall, and bags of coins are collected. Repeat, and repeat again, until we start to think that the major change to this tale is turning Robin into a cold-blooded mass killer.

There certainly isn't much else that has changed between this version and any of the multiple other incarnations of the tale. Marian, for one, seems competent, until she's turned into a damsel for the climax. The other memorable characters of Robin's eventual gang (Yes, the entire movie, written by Ben Chandler and David James Kelly, turns out to be an origin story) are given even shorter shrift, apparently to have their characters fleshed out later (Yes, there's a lot of far-too-optimistic sequel-building, arising from a laughably melodramatic scene, during the epilogue). Despite its early protests, Robin Hood is just another Robin Hood story—and a pretty monotonous and half-hearted one at that.

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