Teaming up for the fifth time, Russell Crowe and director Ridley Scott exercise their gladiatorial instincts once again with Robin Hood, a beefy, brawny epic that, not unlike Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven before it, exudes a certain world-weary spirit. While the filmmakers and studios involved in most Hollywood summer flicks are trending ever increasingly toward streamlined, bantamweight fare, Scott is tracking in the exact opposite direction.
While not dour, per se, Robin Hood provides ample evidence that the veteran filmmaker wants (and indeed, maybe is incapable of delivering anything otherwise) to make films that kick up no small amount of dust, that look beautiful but have grit, that feature dirty fingernails alongside their aggressively modern foley mixes. In placing such an emphasis on chainmail authenticity and the events that lead to “Robin Longstride” returning from the Crusades and slowly growing into such a fanciful figure of legend, however, Scott and Crowe potentially run the risk of delivering a film that is so inconveniently, wildly out of step with mainstream audience expectation as to disappoint.
Based on a script from Brian Helgeland, Robin Hood opens on the edge of the 13th century, at the end of a 10-year religiously inspired military campaign by crusading king Richard the Lionheart (Danny Huston). As they make their way home through France, Richard is felled, leaving capricious younger brother Prince John (Oscar Isaac) susceptible to the more cunning machinations of Godfrey (Mark Strong), a power player looking to stoke the fires of Northern discontent against the British crown, and pave the way for a French incursion.
Robin Longstride (Crowe) is but a lowly archer, garrisoned for fighting, but he soon finds himself on the lam with a motley crew of fellow soldiers, including Little John (Kevin Durand). Using the dead king’s crown and a dead knight’s sword, the group secures passage back to England, letting the lies of their noble stock live on for a while. Haunted by a wish to a dying countryman, Robin feels compelled to return said sword to the fallen knight’s father, Sir Walter Loxley (Max von Sydow), where he meets widower Marion Loxley (Cate Blanchett). Walter then concocts a scheme to welcome Robin back as his deceased son, which he asserts will offer legal protection for their already squeezed, almost starving estate upon his passing.
As Godfrey’s deceits are revealed, various parties inveigh upon Prince John to strike a conciliatory tone with the overtaxed, fed-up tribal factions of Northern England, in order to more effectively turn back the gathering foreign threat. The young king momentarily accedes, and the penultimate showdown in Robin Hood is a beach-set burly-brawl, in which Robin gets to wade out into the tide and smash swords with Godfrey, against a chaotic backdrop that serves as a period piece homage to Saving Private Ryan‘s opening Normandy sequence.
Despite Crowe’s insistence to the contrary, agitated Tea Partiers will likely find a political message here, sparking to the film’s anti-tax, yay-liberty! message that every man should be free to fend for himself. (They’ll conveniently ignore the fact that Robin’s country has been bankrupted largely by the hawkish over-extension of ill-advised foreign military entanglements.) But much of Robin Hood actually runs counter to what has helped entrench the character in popular consciousness. In fact, taking a page from so many comic book adaptations of late, the movie basically serves as an origin story/prequel to the Robin Hood who challenges corruption, and through his quiver and arrow gives voice to the poor. This is essentially Robin Hood’s walkabout — the period wherein he finds out about his deceased father and reaffirms the intestinal fortitude that informs his subsequent “outlaw” existence.
In and of itself that’s not a terrible thing, given the handsomeness with which this production is mounted, and the slow-burn charisma — notably from Crowe, but also some bit players — that powers the movie. It just makes for a thing to be settled into rather than whisked away by. The first hour is a bit sludgy at times, and other than the left-field decision to slap a suit of armor on her for the aforementioned beach siege, there’s not really much for Blanchett to do as Marion. Helgeland and Scott never seem to quite figure out whether their film is supposed to truly submit to the delicate flirtation between Robin and Marion (who, after all, has just lost her husband, no matter the fact that she scarcely knew him), and as such the latter just kind of floats around the film’s edges.
Finally, there’s the movie’s third act speechifying, the very idea of which is rather ridiculous; I don’t think monarchs encouraged in-the-round outdoor debate, let alone impassioned monologues of dissent. For all its investment in historical accuracy on the battlefields, it seems Robin Hood still didn’t figure out a way to completely avoid the Candyland shortcut allure of overly convenient dramatic license. (Universal, PG-13, 140 minutes)