BEFORE: And just like that, I've come to the end of Britfest 2019 - that went by so quickly! Ten films, almost a week and a half, and I covered several queens (Anne, Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth I), a couple of kings (George VI, Edward VIII, Robert the Bruce, and Arthur) one prime minister (twice) and one poet, John Keats. I'm closing with the very fictional Robin Hood, so between him and Arthur it hasn't been all about stuffy textbook history, a bit of fiction crept in after all.
Ben Mendelsohn carries over from "Darkest Hour" - from King George VI to the Sheriff of Nottingham...
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Robin Hood" (2010) (Movie #1,079) & "Robin Hood" (1991) (Movie #1,078)
THE PLOT: A war-hardened Crusader and his Moorish commander mount an audacious revolt against the corrupt English crown.
AFTER: Essentially, this film reminds me of "The Wild Wild West" franchise - it's not meant to be taken seriously, or historically accurate in any way. When Robin is "drafted" (even though military drafts did not exist at the time of the Crusades) and sent off to the Holy Land, the archers are wearing what look like bullet-proof vests, or flak jackets, and they look almost like a modern squad of U.S. soldiers on a mission in Iraq or Afghanistan. And when they come up against an Arab sniper who's using the equivalent of a rapid-fire assault weapon (only with arrows, somehow) it's quite ridiculous, and impossible. But you sort of have to turn parts of your brain off in order to have any hope of enjoying this one, and my guess is that large portions of the audience just weren't able to do that when this was released late last year.
It sort of feels like the ONLY research that this film's screenwriters did was to ignore the last few Robin Hood films and go back to the "classic" story - and by that I mean the 1991 film "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves" with Kevin Costner. They clearly started there, since both films have a Moor character, so as to appear more ethnically diverse (Morgan Freeman in the 1991 film) and both make liberal use of gunpowder, which hadn't been invented yet, or if it had been invented in China, it certainly wasn't used in the U.K. at the time of the Crusades. Then some writer probably said, "Hey, what if Robin of Loxley was more like Bruce Wayne, and Robin Hood was more like Hawkeye, or that Green Arrow guy? Superheroes are very popular now, so why not just write Robin Hood like he's a superhero? A couple other minor tweaks, like turning Will Scarlett into a foil character and making a love triangle between him, Robin and Maid Marian, and this thing practically writes itself!"
Umm, sure, that probably all looked good on paper, but it just didn't translate well to audiences, not at all. This was widely regarded as a box office bomb, despite bring in $82 million in box office - it did cost $100 million to make, after all, and that's not including marketing costs. (Remember, though, they saved money on the script by just tweaking that Kevin Costner film from 1991.) It used to be that a film could have a second life and still be profitable after DVD sales, but those days are over and done - now you just sell the stinker to some cable channel and try to walk away from it.
Speaking of Kings, where the hell is King Richard in all this mess? The whole point of the Robin Hood story is that the U.K. fell apart when King Richard was captured during the Crusades, and his brother, King John, was left in charge. And we all know he was one of the worst kings that England ever had, right? You'd think this would have been a no-brainer to include King John and make him a thinly-veiled Donald Trump character, as a completely incompetent king. Instead they used the Sheriff of Nottingham character to get in some digs at Trump, because when the Sheriff talks about the Crusades here, he mentions the caravans of Arabs that want to invade England, and when they come, they're not sending their best people, they're bringing crime, they're rapists, and they want to burn England down to the ground. I'm surprised that the Sheriff here is raising taxes to fund the war campaign, and not to build a wall.
Ah, but there's a TWIST! The Sheriff is not collecting money to fight the Arabs, he's secretly funding the Arab campaign AGAINST England - yes, this would make sense, if only they mentioned that King Richard was captured by the Turks or Saracens, and they had to raise money for his ransom. (Then the twist could be that the Sheriff was paying them to KEEP King Richard in the Middle East, and off the throne. Ooh, so close here, but not a match, so the board goes back.)
This is not the end of British films for me, because I still have one more King Arthur movie to get to before the end of the year (and like this Robin Hood film, it was also criticized for poorly modernizing a classic story) but I've got to move on to other topics for now.
I didn't really follow the point of the Sheriff kicking everyone out of the town, however, and forcing them to go live across the river in the mines. From a political and economic standpoint, this made no sense. Someone collecting taxes shouldn't really want to evict as many people as possible, because then with nobody owning any property, there wouldn't be any tax to collect. I suppose foreclosure is a valid goal, but if everyone in town has been made poor by the taxes, then who's going to buy all the foreclosed property? This part of the story is very clunky at best, and at worst makes no sense at all. And wouldn't you think that if Robin Hood is stealing all the collected money, and Robin of Loxley appears to be the only person in town with any money at all, that the Sheriff would figure out "The Hood's" identity very quickly? Robin was thought to be dead, his property was seized, so how come he suddenly has all this money? Plus, NITPICK POINT, he just walks back into his former property and starts living there again - but it was foreclosed on (those medieval mortgages were very, very strict - you miss 10 or 12 payments while you're serving in the military and you never get the properly back again!) Shouldn't he have had to buy the property back, and then wouldn't everyone wonder where the hell he got the money to do that?
Then the film really, really went out of its way to wrap up the story in a way that would set up a sequel, but based on this film's performance, I doubt that will happen. (To keep up the "Batman" references, they totally "Two-Faced" one of the characters, to set up the next villain...) Taron Egerton has expressed a disdain for franchise films, anyway - he didn't even want to be in the third "Kingsman" movie after starring in the first two. So most likely, this is a one-off, as in they're only going to make one film, and we're all better off that way.
Also starring Taron Egerton (last seen in "Kingsman: The Golden Circle"), Jamie Foxx (last seen in "Won't You Be My Neighbor?"), Eve Hewson (last seen in "Bridge of Spies"), Tim Minchin, Jamie Dornan (last seen in "Fifty Shades of Gray"), Paul Anderson (last seen in "Hostiles"), F. Murray Abraham (last heard in "Isle of Dogs"), Josh Herdman (last seen in "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2"), Ian Peck (ditto), Cornelius Booth (last seen in "Pride & Prejudice"), Bjorn Bengtsson, Scot Greenan (last seen in "Mary Queen of Scots"), Kane Headley-Cummings (last seen in "Exodus: Gods and Kings"), Lara Rossi, Kevin Griffiths, Catriona Temple, Nicholas Wittman, Yasen Atour (last seen in "Ben-Hur"), Jerome Holder.
RATING: 4 out of 10 hoodies (yeah, they went there...)
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