Sherwood Week: Sheriff don't like it

ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THIEVES

1991

Directed by Kevin Reynolds

Written by Pen Densham and John Watson

Spoilers: inapplicable, really

Robin Hood's theatrical appearances died back during the 70s, following a period of thirty-odd years where his story was told just an unbelievable number of times, in pursuit of reminding people that, back in 1938, Errol Flynn was in a popular film; presumably this was a result of changing mores, occasioning diminished interest in stodgy tales of an unhoused mugger that didn't have much hope of even being aspirational coming out of the Me Decade (even if the legendry did remain a fixture on British television), and thus the one-two punch of "old Robin" in Robin and Marian and "furry Robin" in Disney's animated version put the legend to rest for a bit.  But our timeless hero could only be resting, and in 1991 he returned, the result of screenwriter Pen Densham hoping to put a slight spin on things.  Like everybody else, Densham had identified the relevance of the Robin Hood cycle in its fable of class war, but what he'd decided to do was to really hone in on class as a concrete, expressed element of his story, using it as a framework in which to understand how an English nobleman might come to lead a quasi-socialist peasants' insurgency (because a nobleman is automatically more interesting than Wat Tyler, I suppose, and the name "Robin Hood" has infinitely more marketability), while exploring the moral complexities of armed rebellion.  What he'd have preferred to avoid was a cartoonish good-versus-evil adventure matinee on the long-prevailing Adventures of Robin Hood model.

The film that Densham and his partner John Watson wrote, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, also turned out to be an unstoppable blockbuster—the second-highest-grossing film of 1991; which is to say, if Terminator 2 hadn't existed, it would've been number one—so, as an intellectual exercise for ourselves, let's try to project, from first principles, exactly how ultimately successful Densham was at seeing a thoughtful, political-sciencey Robin Hood through to the finished product of a film that also earned $390 million worldwide, perilously close to a billion dollars today.  "Not a lot!" is the answer, though let us not say that Prince of Thieves is not recognizable as an earnest attempt at a new Robin Hood for the 90s, even if it lurches back and forth between trying to sincerely live up to Densham's vision and the brainless embrace of being the most 1991-vintage Robin Hood action-adventure it could be, as well as between being kind of logy and boring, even for reasons to the side of Densham's program (for Prince of Thieves is, whatever else, just stunningly long: 143 minutes in the theatrical cut that I watched and a reputedly-unfinessed extended edition that I didn't that's a gobsmacking 155) and making the most shuddering mess of itself imaginable.  In fact, its latter mode is the main reason I'm going to give it a positive score without mightily grudging it—it was at a "6/10, I guess, whatever," and then its finale happened, and it earned that 6, in part by becoming so outlandish and undisciplined that while I'm pretty sure it's also outright offensive, it's also too ridiculous to do anything but have fun with it.

As you likely infer, then, I had never actually seen Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves before, and I'm as surprised as you are.  It's sort of impossible, isn't it?  And I don't know exactly how I, a 90s kid, ever managed to avoid it, because it was so very culturally salient—I wasn't under a rock; I certainly became familiar with all the jokes made about it, and the parodies it occasioned—and maybe if I had seen it in its day, its contemporary popularity would be more comprehensible, considering all the strikes against it, which I have by no means so far listed exhaustively.

In any case, what happened was that Densham and Watson's treatment was bought by that up-and-coming production company, Morgan Creek, who were extremely enthusiastic about this movie about examining unrest in Angevin England for some reason, but in the ensuing months it became as much a creature of Hollywood's two reigning Kevins: Kevin Reynolds, who was hired to direct, in part, he suspected, because he was such a close associate of Kevin Costner, who was indeed subsequently inveigled to star despite his fearsomely busy schedule, and right away we've discovered the primary exigence for all those 90s jokes about Prince of Thieves.  These days, it seems like most everybody kind of likes Costner; in the late 80s and early 90s, everybody seemed to have fallen in love with Costner, based (I think) on a couple baseball movies, and as with all rapidly-formed celebrity, this led to an intense backlash.  For my part, the sources of his pop cultural omnipresence have always seemed slightly mysterious, though I've always known he could be well-used, because I've obviously seen Brian De Palma's The Untouchables.  (Incidentally, if you wanted to understand the chaos of my process for some reason, this entire review series came about almost entirely because I wanted to rewatch Waterworld, whereupon I realized I'd never seen Prince of Thieves, or, for that matter, Dances With Wolves; the impending release of The Death of Robin Hood had very little to do with it, my whims having only been retrofitted onto current relevance as matter of happenstance.)

At the same time, I've rarely been personally confronted with the reasons for that backlash, either, and I have managed to maintain a certain agnosticism about Costner as an actor, despite some four decades coexisting with him as a cultural force, and I suppose that's in largest part thanks to having never seen this movie, wherein this Californian plays our 12th century Anglo-Norman hero and no, I don't care about the accent work as such—the entire film is being real-time translated for us; why, do you think these people spoke English?—though the well-publicized vacillation over whether he would attempt an accent, some of that vacillation even making it onscreen (despite an already prevailingly American cast), isn't much of a help to his performance.  But there are more serious concerns, and my agnosticism has now been gravely tested, so that the few firm opinions I've ever held about Costner—namely he has the presence and passion of a respectable career bureaucrat or, I suppose he may prefer, some independent middle-class agriculturalist in the New West—are borne out pretty hard by his take on the unavoidably larger-than-life myth that is Robin Hood, so what works in The Untouchables, and presumably works in JFK and Dances With Wolves, and (so I recall) gets turned towards productively anti-social anti-charisma in Waterworld, just flops with Costner's Robin, a supposed leader of men, in a movie specifically about how Robin became a leader of men who, initially, didn't like or trust him very much  (Also a wooer of women, not that he has more than marginal chemistry with his female lead.)  His entire performance is a sort of shrugging uncertainty that I think wants to be interpreted as a man slowly learning how to be a symbol, or something like that, except the plot, at highly regular intervals, compels him into fiery declarations of purpose that have their basis neither in medieval politics nor this character study but in a stereotypical, downright-Flynnian insouciance, because at some point during this film's journey from screenplay to screen it clearly got de-reinvented.  These declarations have all the sincerity of a hostage video, leaving Costner the soggy spine of a movie that by definition can't really work without him.  And it also has the nerve to foist a revenge motivation upon him, even though I would assume everyone involved had seen, well, Revenge, and witnessed how that came off, even when he's very close to equally miscast in a movie about a Californian alive in 1990.  (I didn't claim to have a perfect agnosticism about Costner.)

So we have our hero, and it may be well to gesture towards the particular plot this time.  So: in the aftermath of the Third Crusade, we catch up with Robin of Locksley, still rocking the casbah, imprisoned by the Saracens and about to be dismembered by his captors.  But Robin escapes, along with a Moor by the name of Azeem (Morgan Freeman), who declares that he will accompany Robin back to his homeland, for he cannot quit Robin until he satisfies his debt by saving his life in turn, though Azeem also soon indicates that he will be the judge of when, where, and how he will do so, in a bit of conceptual comedy (on numerous occasions, Robin is in mortal peril and Azeem just stands there watching) that plays somewhat, though the film is prouder of it than it should be.  Upon arrival in England, Robin learns what we've known for a while: his ancestral home has been burned, and his father (Brian Blessed, and I will indulge in the observation that they probably could've found a more credible casting for Costner's dad) executed on preposterous charges, by one Nottingham (Alan Rickman).  Robin and Azeem—mainly Robin, for reasons previously covered—survive an encounter with Nottingham's cousin-lieutenant (Michael Wincott), and make their way to Robin's neighbor and childhood acquaintance, cousin of the erstwhile Richard Plantagenet (this one's a surprise!), Marian (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), who is herself a dissident to the predatory new regime, but is only of immediate help insofar as she has horses that Robin and Azeem and the Locksleys' blinded servant (Walter Sparrow) can steal.  They're chased into Sherwood, and from here on in the story falls more along the traditional lines, albeit with Robin importunely insinuating himself into a preeexisting band of outlaws—pretty merry, all things considered, but not identified, as I recall, specifically as "Merry Men"—that includes John Little (Nick Brimble) and Will Scarlet (Christian Slater), and shall eventually pick up Friar Tuck (Michael McShane), in a slightly confusing scene, viz. Tuck's prior political allegiance.  Robin asserts the right to lead John and the rest (in part because this Robin Hood has Robin actually best John in their iconic impasse, perhaps because Brimble is of rather normal size), and he transforms their generic dissatisfaction into a revolutionary fervor aimed to overthrow Nottingham.

So what may leap out at you is a certain missing name, and one of Prince of Thieves' smallest problems is the incredibly selective and spongy way it seeks to treat real English history, with a Richard, but no John—nor a Longchamp or Puiset, mind you—only Nottingham.  (It's even less important, but I'd swear they say Richard's in France, making this well after the Third Crusade; but then, this most famed King of England may not have spent a single year of his life in England.)  The much more fundamental problem is that Prince of Thieves swings itself between a bunch of not-especially-compatible modes amounting to three very different movies, all vying for supremacy, and Reynolds isn't so much trying to integrate these different movies as he's allowing, and possibly even encouraging, the topline cast beneath Costner to serve as each one of these distinct movies' proponents, dragging aimless Costner along with them.  The first movie, the reasonably serious one Densham initially set out to make about peasant ressentiment, is almost nonexistent unless Slater is actively delivering dialogue for an unusually-important Will Scarlet, and there's an argument that Slater is actually giving the film its second-best performance; the archetypal Gen Xer is, at least, the movie's most aptly-cast, and the one most in tune with the movie that was originally intended, constantly working against the grain of the matinee programmer, notably when he's the main voice to identify Robin's asymmetric strategy of provocation as what it actually is, pretty much fighting his own personal war against the sheriff down to the last innocent villager.

Meanwhile, that second movie, as noted, is interested only in being a Flynnian afternoon lark updated for 1991—it has a surprising number of explosions—and, occupying a majority of the runtime, this is the primary movie, hence it's a cause taken up by many in the cast (it's Costner's own default, as uncomfortable as it seems to make him), though it's principally headlined by Freeman's smugly-observing Moor.  (Famously, it was Prince of Thieves that confirmed the contemporary era's most important addition to the legendarium by adding a Muslim sidekick, something that obviously wouldn't have been considered by the medieval balladeers, especially because "Robin, the crusader" was, I'm almost certain, not invented until Douglas Fairbanks' Robin Hood in the 20th.  Prince of Thieves is in fact borrowing* from the first Robin Hood to have this character, HTV's 1984-1986 Robin of Sherwood television series; but Prince of Thieves did consolidate the Muslim Merry Man as a Moor, specifically, which isn't indefensible, but is straightforward only when we recall that this Robin Hood and 2018's Robin Hood are American Robin Hoods, and America has more movie stars who fit "Moor" better than the average person you'd meet while fighting a Kurdish sultanate in southern Syria.)

Mastrantonio, being Marian, occasionally serves as standard-bearer of this movie too, and when I refer to "a new Robin Hood for the 90s," naturally that includes a contemplation of female action heroism as a theoretical possibility, albeit a damned tentative one for the year of T2.  You'd assume Marian gets an action scene—and indeed she does, though she only looks cool in a Zorro get-up for a minute, before getting the shit kicked out of her by Robin himself (it's a mistaken identity thing)—but the actual vector for female action is Little John's stout wife (Soo Druet), and fair enough, that's neat and novel.  The denouement (but not the climax) also belongs to this second movie, roping Sean Connery in, to give us permission to wallow in meta-movie fun, and pleased as punch to include the Lionheart after all, even though we would've presumed that, in this avowedly left-leaning universe, his relationship to Robin should be that of some colonizer dickhead (Connery didn't like him in his movie).  But this movie also includes eyebrow-raising stock situations that feel like they barely could've come out of Anglo-American culture period, let alone involved at least one British writer, like the invocation of a crew of mercenary "Celts"—just "Celts," thanks, here amongst English-speakers in the 12th century—that feel like they wandered out of a Robert E. Howard story.  For simplicity's sake, Michael Kamen's not-always-that-noticeable score belongs predominantly to the second movie, though a title track that sounds so much like the "new on Disney home video" cue that I wonder if they're just both biting the same classical composition, belongs to the first.**

The third movie, on the other hand, is gonzo fucking nonsense that, itself, feels like it's mixing up fully three even-more-distinctive movies all on its own—horror! 80s fantasy! even an active parody of the movie we're presently watching! (and I will state directly that this movie might have bigger individual laughs than its actual parody, Robin Hood: Men In freaking Tights, does)—which belongs entirely to Rickman, who did not like this script, actually had his own people rewrite his parts of the script, and to the extent those things aren't visible (they are, mind you, incredibly visible) it's only because apparently Reynolds decided he liked making Rickman's movie the more than the others.  And so we can mention that Prince of Thieves is actually a truly strange aesthetic object, with undoubtedly most of the movie alternating between a couple of fairly friendly-with-each-other approaches, Reynolds and DP Douglas Milsome and their second unit counterparts deciding on a moment-by-moment basis whether they're making a 60s epic full of lush English landscape photography more concerned with quaint iconography than geographical sense (perhaps most famously the Sycamore Gap tree, visually punctuating a scene of Robin using Hadrian's Wall as a sidewalk) or whether they're making a 90s action movie—between Milsome's heaving camerawork and Peter Boyle's spastic editing, basically any action, even the better stuff, gets pretty badly overcooked—that, in the lighting conceits (egregiously, a moon that isn't pretending to be anything other than a spotlight in Jerusalem, while the whole movie has one robust fog machine budget), is also at least as informed by 90s music videos.

And this latter aspect in particular does hold somewhat in this third, Rickman-led movie, except Rickman is, evidently, inspiring Reynolds in ways nobody else is, and what he's been inspired to make out is something uncomfortably but thrillingly close to Sam Raimi's Robin Hood, lurid and bulbous, with a punishing but lively overuse of wide-angled lenses that overexaggerate the already ridiculously-overexaggerated venality that Rickman's decided was the only way to have fun playing Nottingham; this comes with borderline horror inflections, like the fact that Nottingham—more in the Arthurian style—has a gross witch now (Geraldine McEwan, whom the extended edition explains indeed was his biological mother, a relationship that's never lacking clarity in the theatrical cut, only never makes sense).  By the end, it's Rickman's movie all the time, overtaking everybody, which includes all the other actors, suddenly wrenched, apparently happily-enough, onto his wavelength; and, weirdly, it also includes Milsome, who's now shooting every scene like a Nottingham scene.  It's sort of horrid, but it has such gusto, the climax eventually winding up in a place of distressed damselhood that is—for all intents and purposes—ten minutes of rape-based slapstick comedy, with this utter maniac of a villain pretty much literally attempting to consummate his forcible marriage to Marian whilst actively having a swordfight with Robin, and also whilst actively bickering with his mom.  Absolutely nothing about this movie helps me understand why it was 1991's second-most popular film, and its first two hours really don't, but at least, with its finale, I can understand how it made an impression.

Score: 6/10

*"Borrowing" in the same sense that it's "borrowing" the title Prince of Thieves from a 1948 Jon Hall film.

**But I was taken aback to find that one of my favorite Bryan Adams songs—and fuck you, I saw you roll your eyes—has its origins in this movie's closing credits for some reason.  So thanks be to Michael Kamen for that!