In days of yore, the myth of Robin Hood was embodied by brave and noble men: Douglas Fairbanks outwitting the king's thugs by sliding down the length of a slippery medieval brocade curtain; Errol Flynn striding jauntily into a great hall with a dead stag draped around his shoulders like a royal's stole. But, as Ridley Scott's Robin Hood suggests, those are heroes from a lost age. Today's Robin Hood is far more complex, a tortured soul suffering from repressed-memory syndrome, a freedom fighter whose perpetual scowl speaks of a highly attuned sense of justice. Today's Robin Hood is the spirit of freedom disguised as a grumpy gus in a leather jerkin, and he carries something far heavier than legend -- or even Errol Flynn's stag carcass -- on his shoulders: a backstory.
No wonder Russell Crowe, who plays the renowned bandit hero in Scott's big fat mess of an epic, looks so cranky and numbed-out. Robin Hood isn't merely misguided, or overly ambitious, or excessively laden with special effects. Its problems are much bigger than that: The picture is simply oppressive in its blandness, a lumbering symbol of everything that's wrong with big-budget moviemaking these days. Reportedly, Scott may have spent as much as $237 million on this dreary parade float of a movie, but why quibble about the actual amount? The real outrage is that the dollar signs don't even show. Cinematographer John Mathieson, using a palette of dank mud greens and grays, seems to be going for kitchen-sink medievalism, and in the process gives us the ugliest England imaginable, a country hardly worth saving. The picture's numerous battle sequences are cluttered and imprecise, but worse than that, they're just plain ugly -- their most exciting visual elements are flying mud and a jumble of horses' hooves. And the story -- set in the days before Robin Hood started robbing from the rich and giving to the poor -- is all mechanics and no drama. Brian Helgeland's screenplay (from a story by Helgeland, Ethan Reiff, and Cyrus Voris) is needlessly complicated. The filmmakers obviously think murkiness and unnecessary digressions are the same as depth.
There's a lot going on in this Robin Hood, so much that not even the guys in Universal's press department can figure it out. The movie's tagline is "The untold story of how a man became a legend." Apparently, the story still hasn't been told to the poor schmoe who wrote the synopsis in movie's press notes, which reads in part, "Hoping to earn the hand of Maid Marion and salvage the village, Robin assembles a gang whose lethal mercenary skills are matched only by its appetite for life. Together, they begin preying on the indulgent upper class to correct injustices under the sheriff."
That's actually the plot of the Errol Flynn version. In this Robin Hood, Robin's gang is assembled long before he gets to Marion's village: The movie opens as Danny Huston's King Richard the Lionheart is busy waging war against the infidels abroad -- leading the Crusades, don'tcha know -- with the then-named Robin Longstride as one of his loyal soldiers. Robin gets involved in a scuffle -- he angers a hotheaded fellow soldier by duping him with a variation on ye olde three carde monte -- and is put into the stocks, escaping (with the guys who will become the core of his not-so-merry men, a faceless bunch including Scott Grimes and Kevin Durand) when King Richard is killed. Robin returns to England, disguised as dead knight Robert Loxley, and eventually makes his way to Nottingham, where he's greeted warmly by the dead knight's father, Sir Walter Loxley (a creaky Max von Sydow), who happened to know Robin's real-life father, the man whom Robin believes abandoned him many years ago.
Confused yet? Just wait. As it turns out, dead Robert Loxley has left behind a widow, Lady Marion (Cate Blanchett). Marian doesn't much care for this Robin Longstride fellow, but Walter, dirty old fox that he is, urges her to welcome him into her bedchamber. She does so, chastely. In other news, Mark Strong's Godfrey is enacting an intricate plot of treachery against the crown, and Oscar Isaac's Prince John, having gleefully ascended the throne after his brother's death, proceeds to tax the bejeebus out of his citizens. Only Robin can save his beloved England from -- well, from a lot of really bad stuff.
No actor in Robin Hood escapes with his or her dignity intact, with the exception of Eileen Atkins as Eleanor of Aquitaine: She's the movie's single note of true grandeur, appearing at one point with an equally noble tame owl perched on her arm. Blanchett, often a fine and subtle actress, is somnambulant here -- she drifts through the movie like a half-awake, half-aware ghost. She also comes off as sexually indifferent to, if not outright repulsed by, Crowe's Robin. When the two move in for a kiss, their smooching has a perfunctory, "Think of England" quality.
You can't blame her for failing to be turned on by Crowe's Mr. Crankypants routine. He plays Robin's devotion to the common man as one relentless scowl. There's no mirth or mischief in this Robin Hood, only misery. Crowe is far from finished as an actor -- he gave a sturdy, thoughtful performance in Kevin Macdonald's State of Play, and he was even charming in Scott's clumsy but enjoyable A Good Year.
But Crowe is playing a quality here -- a kind of drab, holier-than-thou dignity -- rather than a character, and Scott never calls him on it. He either hasn't noticed or doesn't care, but that's all of a piece with this bungled picture. Scott isn't a graceful director, and we shouldn't expect lyricism from him. But any filmmaker telling the Robin Hood story should be able to achieve more than a persistent throb of dullness, which is the best Scott can manage here.
The loveliest, most gloriously pagan Robin Hood may be John Irvin's 1991 version, starring Patrick Bergin and Uma Thurman, worth seeking out on DVD; it was never released in theaters, thanks to the dunderheaded egotism of Kevin Costner, who didn't want it to compete with his own inane Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (directed by Kevin Reynolds). Ridley Scott's Robin Hood may be even worse than Costner's version, though comparing the two makes for a pretty pittling contest. At least Costner's version feigned some love for its landscape; Scott's is just a moneygrubbing extravaganza, ugly to look at and interminable to sit through. No movie about the evils of excessive taxation should be this taxing.