ROBIN HOOD
2018
Directed by Otto Bathurst
Written by Ben Chandler and David James Kelly
In the mid-10s, Hollywood had no fewer than three Robin Hoods in development, and that's mysterious to me, given that only a few years earlier, Ridley Scott's Robin Hood had lost money; I suppose the thought process was that Scott's film actually made a good gross, so if you could keep the cost from approaching a quarter billion dollars (which Scott had not), then you could make money on the back of the name, though I don't think they recognized that Robin's hit films operate on more of a generational cycle (if that), and Scott had surely exhausted this generation's interest. Nonetheless, they strove: Disney's contender wasn't even a live-action remake of the one with the talking cartoon animals, instead being, apparently, just an outright theft of the abandoned original concept behind Scott's picture (they called it Nottingham & Hood); Sony, meanwhile, was pursuing their Robin Hood, which must've been totally, boringly normal, given I've not seen anyone even bother describing it.
But it was Leonardo DiCaprio's company, Appian Way, partnered with Lionsgate, who got there first; and their Robin Hood was never meant to be normal. I was prepared to chalk it up to the culture simply converging on similar twists on similarly-situated concepts, but it turns out that while his name is buried alongside numerous other executive producers here, this Robin Hood was pitched by the very same Joby Harold who'd previously conceived Guy Ritchie's 2017 King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. Now, I've never seen that one, but it sure sounds similar to the Robin Hood I just watched: a real damn "whatever, dude" approach, soaked through with modernist attitude. It's made me more curious about Legend of the Sword, because the Robin Hood they made in 2018 (its writing credits ultimately going to Ben Chandler and David James Kelly) is good. Or the parts I like outweigh the parts I don't, which is functionally identical to "good."
It starts off on the wrong foot, superfluously narrated by a Friar Tuck (Tim Minchin) who resorts to the kind of pitifully preemptive crouch you might imagine a Robin Hood in 2018 would take—this movie, Tuck assures us, "won't bore you with the history"—and trust me, it doesn't. What this narration establishes, anyway, even if the narrative and images in progress are already doing so themselves, is that Marian (Eve Hewson) is not a noblewoman, but a commoner, compelled to do-gooding thievery, and that's how she makes the acquaintance of Robin of Loxley (Taron Egerton), a minor lord in Nottinghamshire whose horse she's decided to steal directly from his stables, which he allows because Marian's hot. I confess I assumed they shortly thereafter wed, because this is a Robin Hood movie, and because they're openly cohabitating in Robin's manor; but even though I continued to assume this throughout the entire film, it's clearly not what actually happened and we'll soon see there's no reason to imagine it was. Regardless, that cohabitation is cut short by Robin's draft notice—indeed—to go on crusade, and like that, we're in what the movie perhaps unnecessarily identifies as a city in what is today northeastern Saudia Arabia, which altogether suggests one crazily successful crusade. But that's because Robin has been drafted less into the Third Crusade than Operation Iraqi Freedom.
This is gobsmackingly bold in its "DO YOU GET IT"-ness: the few minutes of movie that have elapsed have made it clear, visually and in dialogue (Marian describes this Anglo-Norman knight as a "toff"), that it's going to have a pretty fast-and-loose relationship with "historical accuracy," but these minutes have not been, I think, an actual preparation; for now we cut almost immediately to Robin in Kebrit, in clothing that's close to not even trying to be the medieval version of American Desert Camouflage Uniform and associated tactical webbing, where he and his squad, led by Gisbourne (Paul Anderson), skulk anxiously through the rubble of ruined buildings and the washed-out, sun-blasted cinematography, and the joke titles Farang Sniper or Full Metal Shaft would still just be literal descriptions of the content, especially once they stumble across the prepared position manned by a Saracen equipped with an apparently belt-fed automatic crossbow.
Even having been told "it makes its Iraq War parallels obvious," I couldn't have understood how incredibly close they're pushing "combat with arrows" into "urban warfare hellscape firefight," which does have the benefit of teaching us how to watch this as an action film. Once it's established its bona fides (or whatever) as a severe post-Saving Private Ryan war movie (it's still better at this than Scott's film), it shades, pretty rapidly, into movie-movie gunfights with bows and arrows, that are also gun fu fights with bows and arrows, full of martial arts and acrobatics—let's just say "John Woo" and agree that's descriptive, without necessarily making it a qualitative statement. And even then, I don't think the comparison would be terribly unflattering, Robin Hood's action scenes being extraordinarily flashy and willing to luxuriate in a certain chaos—even the speedramped parts (maybe I should've said "Zack Snyder") are definitely more about a stylishness than analytical clarity—but not, for that, ever especially unclear in either their geography or their cascading shoot-'em-up cause-and-effect; if clarity is lacking, it's almost exclusively down to the added steps "shooting a bow" imposes, versus the simplicity of firearms. Yet Robin will later learn, during a good old-fashioned training montage, how to shoot multiple arrows—not like that—essentially doing so in semi-automatic fashion, by holding multiple arrows in immediate reserve between his knuckles. I would strongly assume this is impossible; but coolness reigns. (Robin also later receives a more x-treme, recurved, Turkic bow, a "street weapon.") And if you were wondering how bombed-out ruins came to be in 119X, by the end of this scene Gisbourne will have remotely called in an artillery strike. It's almost sufficient to wish it weren't Robin Hood at all, but, like, Kingdom of Heaven 2: The Quickening, and this feeling is plainly shared by its makers, because even once it resituates itself—to not-much-more-familiar climes—this Robin Hood is very much going to fail to ever shut up about these crusades.
Well: the English operation has obtained prisoners, including a certain Yahya ibn Umar (Jamie Foxx), and Gisbourne is torturing them for "intelligence," so while beholding Yahya beg for the life of his son, Robin has suddenly had enough, instigating a POW escape that returns Yahya to freedom but does not save his son, and also gets Robin correctively impaled and sent home. What Robin doesn't know is that Yahya has stowed away and followed him; nor that upon his return he'll find his house has been seized by the Sheriff of Nottingham (Ben Mendehlson) but also, for some reason, abandoned and trashed; nor that he was declared dead years ago (during the Third Crusade, 1189-1192), leaving Marian a quasi-widow who has latterly begun a new relationship with her coworker at the cokeworks (they say "mine") and fellow community organizer, Will something-or-other (Jamie Dornan). It is at this lowest point that Yahya catches up with Robin and implores him to just call him John, and stop mangling a name a Welsh actor would probably find trivial, but mainly he lays out Robin's destiny: to reclaim his aristocratic status, yet only as a blind so that, once his skills have been sufficiently montaged, he can take to the shadows, hooded and disguised (in the scarf of John's own dead son, heavy), as a revolutionary hero. This "Hood" works to sever the financial arteries that feed their mutual persecutors, Nottingham and his masters, the Catholic Church.
So, at the risk of pointing out something thunderingly obvious but still incredibly startling, it's that this thing is left-wing as fuck, conceivably the most overtly leftist movie funded to the tune of $100 million in the last ten years, as well as, to the best of my knowledge, the most overtly leftist Robin Hood, and not even by a small margin, even when all of them are supposed to be sufficiently leftist that, believe it or not (you probably do), a McCarthyite once tried to ban Robin Hood stories from schools. There's the explicit class war and protest imagery, the hostility towards a Christianity that sanctifies irrational Islamophobia as a distraction from real problems, even Will standing in for the cravenness of mainstream liberals. It positively gets the never-shutting-the-fuck-up-about-Iraq part right. Given the lag time, it was too early for Trump (I would strongly suspect the unseen king would've proven to be a Trumpian figure in a sequel), but it's aged pretty well, when over the past few years its metaphor has accidentally shifted and we've subordinated our own interests to those of a Levantine potentate, and the metaphor's even more galling now: most crusades were more justifiable than whatever will be on the news today, while our "ally" makes Richard Plantagenet look like a humanitarian and Enrico Dandolo seem like he had an idea worth emulating in suitably modified form. Anyhow, Robin Hood's director Otto Bathurst turns out to be a straight-up nob, his late father being the 3rd Viscount Bledisoe (his elder brother being the 4th), though this means little since 1999, when they abolished that hereditary peerage, kind of like Loxley's reduced birthright; so, in the absence of any crusades, I guess the only thing to do was to become a would-be firebrand filmmaker, whose c.v. also includes that Black Mirror where the prime minister fucks the pig.
So that's neat, and I like the Robin Hood he made, which you wouldn't confuse with the dreary Black Mirror house style he helped establish. On the one hand, there's the whole "Nottinghamshire, a space colony after the fall of the Galactic Empire" visual identity of Jean-Vincent Puzot's production design, which is extraordinarily estranging, but exciting, and surprisingly easy to get used to, despite how it mixes and matches its 12th, 19th, and 21st century signifiers with giddy abandon, like how this Robin Hood's burliest action sequence happens in those cokeworks. (One may be legitimately surprised this medieval times movie doesn't have any pre-credits needledrops.) This is at least matched in bewilderment by Julian Day's costume design, though, even if it's possibly even more important, it's less uniformly-successful in its productive alienation. Now, I'm thrilled by those crusader fatigues, and there are individual costumes that are sublime (Robin at one point wears a gray suit from what might as well be the 22nd century, that when you get a closer look is actually gray-and-blue plaid), and even if Day appears to have reinvented Arrow from first principles (if not just, you know, seen Arrow) that isn't exactly incorrect for Urban Superhero Robin Hood. ("You haven't mentioned forests," you say, and this one's got less Sherwood than Scott's did, Robin arriving in the greenwood only in the coda of a movie that was—again, mysteriously, given Scott's film's sour aftertaste—first titled Robin Hood: Origins. It is a "Robin Hood origin," but they're almost all Robin Hood origins, and this one is not therefore unable to tell a satisfying, and mostly complete, adventure.)
But there's the less-good: Nottingham's baby blue SS greatcoat is surely not affirmatively inspired, and a scene involving a high society masque that literally none of our principals go masqued for is frankly confusing, while when someone first pins up Robin's symbol, a hood—okay, this isn't really Day's fault—I genuinely didn't know what the fuck I was looking at, because without a head a hood's a blob of cloth. (Also not Day's fault: underestimating the effectiveness of steel plate armor against arrows; not that I'm earnestly criticizing that.) But the women's costumes, by which I mean "Marian's costumes," would be a stark disappointment even in a tradition that didn't include The Adventures of Robin Hood, seeming to operate under no philosophy that fits the nominal setting, nor the actual movie's gonzo setting, just "this is a little adolescent in temperament, so we should probably indicate we're aware of Hewson's cleavage, but it's also 2018 so the closest her extremely regular clothes get to sexy is her initial burst of cosplay as a thief dressed like Kitana from Mortal Kombat II, which as an orientalist gesture will be momentarily confusing when you know the movie is set partially in 'Arabia,' and which we will follow up later with a disguise that will remind you of Kung Lao, also from Mortal Kombat II." Well, in compensation, colorfulness arrives in much fuller force by way of George Steel's photography, which is doing that late-10s pop art garishness that I remain a fan of, just swathing shit in the gaudiest colored lighting schemes, sometimes countervailing for a two-toned effect and sometimes not, always with the bare minimum (if that) of "motivation," like "candles" producing urine-colored LED light from different locations than the candles (though I'm describing Nottingham's house, so it's not "urine-colored" inappropriately). I'd say it tends to unify a movie (at least in the nighttimes; the daytimes, outside Arabia, are mostly only adequate) that, if you weren't a fan, could be accused of a proto-slop complexion, and much of that production design sure reads as "digital set extension." (Robin Hood wasn't outrageously costly, already by 2018 almost "mid-budget", and Bathurst massages his aesthetic to fit the price tag; it isn't betrayed too often, really only in the single thoroughfare that seems to be Nottingham's sole road, and in the fearsome "rear projection's revenge" compositing of the actors into that burly cokeworks chase.)
But however enthusiastic I sound, I'm not in love. This isn't really at the feet of the actors, though the good performances stop with our central heroes: Foxx quite easily takes the top spot amongst "Muslim Merry Man" performances, with a concept I wouldn't want to see endlessly-replicated ("Little John" and "Azeem" should, generally, be their own guys, and neither should usually be Robin's Obi-Wan), but is clever as a one-off remix, in spite of John's function somewhat stalling out, and Foxx being sidelined; and Egerton very much suits the parameters of this particular Robin, a natural progression for the then-young actor who'd played a chav-to-gentleman James Bond for Kingsman and now plays the gentleman-to-chav version of this British icon. (Plus, just lookit all his silly faces! That's not just these screencaps, it's the whole movie.) Still, neither the script nor Bathurst indulge Egerton's strengths: Egerton nails his self-abnegating separation from Marian early on, in service of an emotional subplot that, nonetheless, only lazily meanders its way across the rest of the runtime, whereas nobody even seems that interested in actually using the movie's Zorroesque innovation of a secret identity either for comedy or anything else. So I haven't even gotten beyond our heroes before complaining, but there we are: Mendelsohn is clearly having some fun barking out florid threats, but whether it's the shadow of Ready Player One or what, it feels like Mendelsohn is who you cast for a satirical loser of a villain with only residual menace, which may well have been the goal (he's quite underfoot to F. Murray Abraham's (!) cardinal) but it does feel like Nottingham's purpose wasn't completely worked out; then there's Hewson, an unsurprisingly meager presence, not that Dornan is much better, though at least that's arguably intentional.
The cast isn't sinking it, then, but if I do still think it's having trouble staying afloat, maybe it's simply that it's... dumb. And there's a difference between the gleeful dumbness it has at its best, which totally works, and the actual dumbness increasingly afflicting it. We do get an early indication, when Robin and John declare their intention to find out "where the money goes," and, like, where do you think? (Or even "does that matter"? It does, actually.) I initially thought they meant physically, but no, and this is the plot; if it keeps this Robin Hood from being vignettish, that doesn't mean it's helpful.
So maybe I sound like I'm being stupid, but this Robin Hood, that I've praised for being so loopy, has bad world-building. It's because it's so loopy, in fact, that it has a duty towards world-building that other Robin Hoods don't, and it's more like its world-building has been left so damned foggy that anything beyond "Robin's good, Nottingham's bad" is incomprehensible, and it feels like it's foggy on purpose, as if it fully realizes that it's left you with the distinct impression that it's constantly contradicting itself, so it refuses to give you sufficient information to be sure. A huge "for example" is the mention of a king* for the first time at something like the hour-thirty mark, despite a whole movie that's drunkenly slouching towards a vision of England as a full-on colony of Rome. Its conspiratorial leanings, meanwhile, ultimately result in a twist that's not only unnecessary, bizarre, and confusing (I'm not sure exactly what it's trying to critique anymore once it accuses the Church of funding the Saracens to keep the crusades going), but completely irrelevant (I thought that it would at the least have a function, like turning our heartbroken Graham Platner of Gisbourne into an ally or something).
This is all burdensome, as is the unwillingness to figure out how to have a single, integrated climax, rather than sort of restarting the finale after remembering John exists (it doesn't help that the finale is the weakest, altogether, of the movie's four major setpieces), but while it does still do what Robin Hoods need, it does have something of its own sour aftertaste. Somehow, they were still thinking in terms of a Robin Hood "franchise": the script, which I've suggested is clever in its reimaginations of the legendary characters, is only being clever like an asshole now, when it smugly reminds you that "sheriff of Nottingham" is technically not an individual, but an office; it affords us a concluding five minutes that's nothing besides an advertisement for the same movie we just watched. Yet it's not unsuccessful (artistically; financially it bombed), and genuinely novel in a way Robin Hoods usually just aren't—without really doing wrong by Robin in the process.
Score: 6/10
*Unnamed, like this movie of all movies is worried about offending Lionheart stans.
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