Robin Hood, the legendary outlaw of English folklore, had been a favorite character in films and TV in every decade for more than a century. He was the subject of a 1908 silent film ("Robin Hood and his Merry Men"), a 1922 Douglas Fairbanks silent swashbuckler ("Robin Hood"), a 1938 Errol Flynn action classic ("The Adventures of Robin Hood"), a 1973 animated film with anthropomorphic animal characters ("Walt Disney's Robin Hood"), a 1991 Kevin Costner version ("Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves") and its 1993 spoof by Mel Brooks ("Robin Hood: Men in Tights"), a 2010 Russell Crowe version ("Robin Hood"), among the more notable examples.
This reboot of the Robin Hood legend had Robin of Loxley as a Lord drafted into military service and sent to fight in the Middle East as a Crusader. When he came back, everyone thought he was dead, his estate had been foreclosed, his love Maid Marian was betrothed to someone else, and the Sheriff of Nottingham lorded over everyone like a monarch. This new Robin, with his foreigner friend John and friar friend Tuck, took his iconic "stealing from the rich, giving to the poor" routine to a whole new revolutionary level.
Taron Egerton played a young, very clean cut and debonair Robin of Loxley, unlike the more mature Robins of movies past. Like Bruce Wayne, he never distanced himself from the aristocracy to keep his enemies close. Whenever he wanted to do his heroic duty, he would don a hoodie and a mask to conceal his identity and embody a vigilante dubbed "The Hood" by the people. Because of his cool and charming rascally demeanor, Egerton's Robin was like the personification of Disney's animated fox Robin Hood.
All the other Merry Men were also in the story but portrayed differently from how we knew them in the past. Jamie Foxx was John, an enemy Arab warrior who later became Robin's friend and adviser. Tim Minchin was Friar Tuck, a monk who worked closely with the poor despite being ridiculed by the rich. Jamie Dornan was Will Scarlet, whose original role in the traditional ballads was totally rewritten in this version. Eve Hewson's Maid Marian was proactive and resourceful. She knew what she wanted and fought for it, definitely not a mere damsel in distress.
Ben Mendelsohn's Sheriff of Nottingham was a cartoonishly lame villain, almost a caricature of witless evil. His final scene verged on the absurd, with an emphatic announcement so embarrassing I don't know how they could have shot the scene without laughing. This sheriff blamed his cruel ways on abuse he suffered as a child at the hand of clergy. This was in consonance with F. Murray Abraham's slimy portrayal of the Cardinal, who, as the writers' version of Crusades history, represented everything that was wrong about the Catholic Church at that time.
Director Otto Bathurst derived inspiration from several other movies and managed to squeeze them here, anachronistic as they may be. From all those Desert Storm movies, we get that shoot-out sequence only with bows and arrows instead of machine guns. There was a scene of lavish orgiastic gambling party of the rich and famous that could have been from "The Wolf of Wall Street." There was a frenetic chase scene between a couple of horse-drawn carriages that was reminiscent of the chariot races in "Ben Hur," complete with the collisions and tipping over.
Despite the likability of Taron Egerton as Robin, this film never felt right from the beginning. It was entertaining at parts, but lagged in parts. It was not completely engaging, and it never really reached a peak. 5/10.
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