So there’s yet another Robin Hood movie out this week cleverly called Robin Hood. This one differs from the usual version of the story by both being exceedingly dumb and assuming its audience is exceedingly dumb. Boy… you can tell this is gonna be a positive review, huh?
Robin Hood stars Taron Egerton (from the Kingsman movies) as Robin (or just “Rob” since that’s “edgier” or something) and Jamie Foxx as Little John (who returns with Rob from the Crusades). Ben Mendolsohn is the Sheriff of Nottingham, Jamie Dornan is Will Scarlet, and an actress named Eve Hewson is Marion… not sure who she is and maybe she’s great, but not in this movie. Which is what I can say about most the other actors too.
Now, this is a bad movie but when I talk about the inaccuracies and anachronisms below (at ridiculous length), I’d probably be more forgiving if the rest of the movie were good. But oh god the movie is bad.
The movie starts with some opening narration that assures us that this is not like any Robin Hood you’ve ever seen and to just kind of relax. Last thing that told me to relax while watching a bad movie was Mystery Science Theater 3000… which isn’t a good sign. But this narration had to have been inserted to preemptively create a wall to guard the movie from jackanapes like me who will call it out for being inaccurate to the time period.
The time period doesn’t matter, the movie tells us, and then instantly delivers a note to Rob telling him that he (Lord Lochsley) has been drafted into the Third Crusade. Well, I don’t know when exactly the third crusade was but you can be sure I Googled it (1189-1192). Silly rabbits. So we have our time period and we have a drafted young man. Did they draft people during the Crusades? Maybe commoners but did they draft the landed gentry and nobles? Did the Sheriff of Nottingham have this authority? I suspect not.
So one of the first things we see in the Holy Land is that the Arabs are laying down suppressing fire with a gatling gun ballista… firing two or three arrows per second. Our heroes – a commando squad with bows and drawn arrows – are infiltrating behind enemy lines. I know the weapon was silly, but did medieval soldiers move like a modern SEAL team and, if so, did they do so with drawn bow and arrow only?
Anyway, that crowssbow was silly but, when Rob gets home, all the enemy soldiers have full-size hand-held repeating crossbows and then, later, one-handed repeating crossbows. And one had an exploding tip arrow (about 100 years before Europe got gunpowder… thanks Google). Other people wield grenades… which, to be fair, might have been grenade-shaped molotov cocktails (which weren’t invented or used in war until the 1930s). And the enemy armored knights had riot shields… now soldiers had tall shields for thousands of years but not, as far as I know, what we would recognize as riot shields until the 1960s, according to Google.
And let’s not forget the costumes these characters wore. Both Rob and Little John wore modern T-Shirts… which weren’t invented until the 1800s. The Sheriff of Nottingham wore a thoroughly modern leather jacket with finer stitching than anyone would have had then. Marian – who was poor – had a lacy nightgown in one scene and a gold filigree night gown (with plunging neckline) and smokey eye shadow which existed but looked laid on too modern, I think. Rob wears a literal pinstripe suit at one point… stripes might have existed but a decorative pinstripe pattern like this seems less likely.
It turns out Nottingham is the political, military, and financial heart of all of England, apparently. London? P’shaw. The Sheriff of Nottingham wants to steal all the gold from the common folk so he can, with the help of the corrupt church, fund the war effort in the Holy Land which, something something, will allow him to take over the throne from the King in London. Not sure how this was gonna happen except through wild hand waving.
Rob operates only in the city of Nottingham which is a hellscape of jetting flames like in Blade Runner. The city is built against a mine and a steel foundry complete with massive vats of boiling steel like they were going to pour ibeam molds and build skyscrapers. This movie thinks its in the industrial revolution and I think maybe the film thinks the audience is too stupid to know the difference.
Because the movie is dumb and I’m not sure how much of that is from ignorance or how much is them thinking the audience is stupid. Because the audience – kids these days – couldn’t handle a traditional Robin Hood movie so we’re going to set it during the industrial revolution of the 1200s. Who’s to say they didn’t wear clothes like these or have an industrial plant in Nottingham? Or that having Rob and one of about three black people (Jamie Foxx) in town running around in disguises (like superheroes) and nobody would be able to identify them?
Look, most of this review is calling out this stuff and, like I said, if the movie were good, maybe I’d have let it go. I can handle anachronism if they are done right or if they were trying to make a point or create a heightened reality. But nothing here FELT like they were going for something other than trying to be cool enough for the teenagers. I mean, what teenage girl could fall in love with some dude named ROBIN. Better shorten that to Rob. Who could care about a bow when we can fire dozens of arrows at once and we can pretend these are machine guns, not silly, slow arrows?
What it comes down to is the movie is just outright bad. It’s boring and the plot moves along too quickly without much character and is full of “huh? why are they doing that?” moments like the script had gone through rapid changes without fixing new problems. There’s a lot of action scenes and, to be fair, they are easy to follow but they aren’t exciting. It’s a LOT of noise and speed ramping camera work but I couldn’t care less about any of it. Nobody was a real character, they did irrational things because the plot told them to, and it was just exceedingly dumb.
This is a misfire on an impressive level. If anyone remembers this turkey in a few years, it’ll be fascinating to see an analysis from real historians how far off the rail it went. I don’t recommend it to anyone… it’s not even so bad its good. It’s far too self-serious and just not weird enough beyond its anachronisms. I guess a historian could sit through it for a chuckle? I dunno. Not sure we needed another Robin Hood movie but I know we didn’t deserve this one.
Score: 55