SmartRemarks

The critical reaction to the new movie Robin Hood, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Russell Crowe in the title role, has been decidedly mixed. It averages a mere 45% from critics compiled on RottenTomatoes.com, many of whom seem to have been cribbing from the same notes. They complain of the movie’s 140-minute length (apparently gleaned from a press kit rather than their own watches; the actual running time is just 130); they complain that the climactic beach battle evokes Saving Private Ryan; they complain that it’s an origin story seemingly designed to set up a “franchise”; most often, they complain that it’s not Errol Flynn, that it’s too short on swashbuckling merriment, that “the Robin Hood of myth and moviedom is for the most part AWOL,” as WaPo’s Michael O’Sullivan puts it.

Much of this carping seems to me not just wrong but fundamentally misguided. I’m a huge and unapologetic fan of Flynn’s classic 1938 Adventures of Robin Hood, but that movie’s already been made, and it’s out there on disc for anyone who wants to enjoy it again. This film isn’t an attempt to remake that, or the much more forgettable 1991 Kevin Costner version of the story, or any of the other literally dozens of film and TV adaptations to which the Robin Hood legends have been subjected. It’s not trying to give viewers the same old cereal in a new box. It’s trying to come up with a new take, a story different enough to be worth telling. In large part it succeeds, and taken on its own terms, it’s a heartily enjoyable film.

Neither the creative revisionism nor its success should be a surprise. Ridley Scott is the director who gave us such films as Blade Runner and the classic Thelma & Louise, not to mention—in previous work with Crowe—Gladiator, American Gangster, and Body of Lies. As for Crowe, those three films alone demonstrate his phenomenal range as an actor (nearly as much of a chameleon as Edward Norton), even without looking at his work in other roles as diverse as L.A. Confidential, his Oscar-nominated turn in The Insider, and his incredibly layered performance in the otherwise mediocre A Beautiful Mind. Both men are prolific, but neither is known for doing retreads of familiar work. Teamed with Brian Helgeland, the screenwriter behind L.A. Confidential and the recent and unjustly neglected Green Zone, Scott and Crowe have turned out a Robin Hood that does not attempt to cater, as Kenneth Turan observes, to “those expecting traditional Robin Hood satisfactions.” It’s more history than Hollywood—or at least a well-balanced compromise between the two.

[Spoilers ahead.]

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Tags: history, movies, Ridley Scott, Robin Hood, Russell Crowe