A Wannabe Epic

Robin Hood (2010)

Director – Ridley Scott

Starring – Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett, Mark Strong, and William hurt,

MPAA – Rated PG-13 for violence including intense sequences of warfare, and some sexual content.

Picture these scriptwriters pitching story ideas to each other while walking down the hall at Universal Studios. They have this decent idea for a mid-evil film that deals with the close of Richard the Lionheart’s crusade and his return to England.
The problem is that they don’t really know how to make it marketable. Then these scriptwriters bump into Ridley Scott who is in the mood for making a period piece and he likes this story idea. To market the film they start thinking it might be a good idea to make the film a sequel to Kingdom of Heaven. But Scott is too good a director to sequel a movie that wasn’t all that great to begin with, so they pitch around some more ideas and someone says, “Hey let’s make it a prequel to Robin Hood!” Obviously they had never read any of the Robin Hood legends but they knew some of the character’s names and went with it.



For those die hard Robin Hood fans, if there are any… This film kind of reworks the whole beginning of the Robin Hood stories. Russell Crowe’s Robin Hood is not the clever, charming, jesting Robin Hood of the legend I grew up with as a child. Instead he is a sly, serious man with a troubled past. He is essentially the beefy and loyalty inspiring Maximus from “Gladiator”. It works for the film, but I always pictured Robin Hood as a much happier and more light-hearted guy, and anyone who has read the old legends would agree.

Setting this prequel business aside there are some really good aspects to this film. The plot is pretty creative. Robin Longstride (Russell Crowe) is a brave and beloved archer in the army of King Richard. Richard’s army has completed its bloody crusade and is storming across France plundering the country for money to pay for the expensive crusade. Through a bit of bad luck Robin and his comrades, Little John, Will Scarlett, and Allan A’Dayle, desert the army and cut across France trying to return to England. They stumble on an ambush of the King’s knights and Robin Longstride meets a dying Robert Loxley (the original surname of Robin Hood from the old stories). Longstride promises Loxley he will return a sacred sword to Loxley’s father at Nottingham.



The band of merry men, mostly merry because these ruffians drink and sing like modern rock stars, then dress in the garb of the ambushed knights and take their boat to England. Of course in the wake of a missing King Richard, the younger brother John has screwed up the country. Longstride assumes the name of Loxley with the consent of the elder Loxley and begins a romance with Marianne, who was married to the dead knight Loxley. Robin unearths his past, helps save England from the invading French, kicks a lot of butt, and in the end somehow becomes an outlaw in Sherwood Forest. Like I said, it was supposed to be a different film, but to get us to the theater they decided to make it a prequel, and it is true I might not have seen it had there not been a Robin Hood angle.

The plot though was entertaining. In fact the whole buildup of the film and the character developments was very strong. The script needed a little fine tuning to make it sound a little more middle age-ish, but it still told an interesting story, that might have stood on its own a little better than trying to mash it in with the old Robin Hood tales. In fact there was a lot of unmet potential here that the film just didn’t quite pull off. And now we all want to see the next film, so we can find out what happens. What was really disappointing was the Invasion-of –Normandy style attack the French make on England. It was like Ridley Scott just copy and pasted a bunch of shots from the opening scenes of “Saving Private Ryan” and meshed them with some battles from “Braveheart”, it was not a very plausible or convincing battle. The French even had the same kind of boats the Allies had in Spielberg’s epic.

Some of the pacing throughout the film also felt a little jumbled. The story was trying to do a political thriller in med-evil England while also keeping up a mistaken identity (or hidden identity)/ romance, and the cutting back and forth made the movie feel a little choppy and made it difficult to fully develop either story, and when they tried to make the two subplots in the middle it all kind of jumbled up and got lost. Truly this film would have been a much better if the makers had not tried to do what Antoine Fuqua did with King Arthur, a much more cohesive and well put together “How the Man Became the Legend” movie.




The action and violence was relatively gore-free. As opposed to Gladiator, which was stunning, one of the best films ever made, but very gory, Robin Hood is heavy on the action, light on gore. There is a lot of war violence, people getting hit by arrows, slashed with swords, dying right and left; and all of it is pretty realistic, but we are spared the spraying blood that hits the camera lens just so, and the severed body parts rolling around the battlefield. It is still a gritty action film, with lots of great battle scenes, but the violence is very PG-13, not even bordering R.

Robin Hood earns a 7 out of 10. It was a disappointing prequel, but standing alone, it was an interesting and exciting film that just didn’t get fully developed. If the story and the script had been ironed out a little bit before the crew got to production then all in all Ridley Scott could have had a real winner on his hands. Instead it is an average movie, pulled down even further by the Hollywood prequel/ sequel craze so abundant in the summer list of flicks.

Sex/Nudity – 6 out of 10 – an older woman finds her son engaged in sexual intercourse with a woman who is not his wife, we see them under a blanket clearly having sex, the mother pulls down the blanket to reveal the man’s bare back and the bare arms and shoulder and most of the bare breast of a woman, the man stands and we see his bare chest and part of his bare buttocks. We see women in cleavage revealing outfits, a few men pursue these women and we see the men shirtless the next morning and we assume they have had intercourse. A man attempts to rape a woman, we see part of her bare leg. A women helps a men out of his armor and we see his bare chest, this is a non sexual scene.

Violence Gore – 7 out of 10 – Refer to the second to last paragraph.

Profanity – 2 out of 10 - three or four religious exclamations, some name calling and 7 obscenities.