Author:
Dell
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Date:
10/5/2010 2:29:32 PM
Subject:
RE: I saw Robin Hood
Sim, as always, you're able to attack problems and concisely break them down. Maybe you should have been a lawyer!
I watched this the other day, and my problems:
1) Robin Hood, whatever his antecedents, has become in late 20th and early 21st century mythology a very PG or PG-13 characterization. Blame this on Errol Flynn or Kevin Costner if you like.
1a) This movie tried to be another historical epic like Kingdom of Heaven (the uncut version of which is actually really good)...but given modern audiences, if a director or a writer needs a sense of verisimilitude, they must do it with language or violence (see: Deadwood, Rome). This movie simply didn't have it. The violence, shaky-cam brutal as it was, doesn't hold a lick to Liam Neeson's line in KoH: "I once fought for three days with an arrow through my testicle." That one line delivered more pwn than anything in Robin Hood.
3) Robin was pretty damn unlikeable throughout the movie. In Prince of Thieves there was this scene where he robs a noblewoman in the forest and says "My lady...someone of your beauty has no need of such decorations" and takes her rings and flees. Costner was a hideous Englishman but in that one scene delivered more of the legend than Crowe ever did in Ridley Scott's version.
3) It pretty much sucked. Disjointed, oddly filmed, and somehow arrogant--some scenes from the French invasion were almost directly lifted from a movie more than ten years old and repackaged as something new; it doesn't make a good film.
