UK Release Date: 12-05-2010
Starring: Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett
UK Certificate: 12A
Director: Ridley Scott
Country: US/UK

To turn the story of Britain’s most famous outlaw into a Ridley Scott / Russell Crowe movie, the mists of time have been rolled back to reveal our hero as he was before the legend proper kicks off, a humble(ish) archer in the army of Richard the Lionheart. Meaning, of course, in film-making terms, spectacular fight scenes and lots of leading men into battle for your star actor, who one senses isn’t so keen on hiding in forests. This 'origins' Robin Hood opens with the beseiging of a French castle by the demoralised English army, on their way home after an unhappy Crusade. The king is killed, and an extraordinary sequence of events carries Robin back to Ye Olde Englande and installs him amongst a noble family in Nottingham. Here, he pretends to be the master of the household returned from the Crusades, which position, as chance would have it, comes with a pretty wife, Maid Marion (Cate Blanchett). King John raises taxes, a duplicitous knight summons some evil Frenchies to help collect them, and Robin Hood leads the people of England against an invasion force headed for the White Cliffs of Dover. Just as we get to the bit of the story where Robin is cast out to skulk in Sherwood Forest as one of an outlaw band, there presumably to indulge in such unspeakablenesses as stealing from the rich to give to the poor, the credits roll.

Given the will-o’-the-wisp nature of any actual, historical Robin Hood, it’s no offence to the source material to embellish it with invention, and sidestepping the more famous elements of the Robin Hood narrative has the advantage of setting this version apart from previous retellings, although it does rather make you wonder why they bothered evoking the myth in the first place. It’s distracting, sitting for nearly two and a half hours expecting that any minute now this uncommonly burly Robin will throw off his knightly shackles and go skipping off into the greenwood with his Merry Men, there to nick some goblets and cross swords with the dastardly Sheriff of Nottingham. Still, the first half cracks along in a welter of arrows and glowering and action, there are some nicely comic lines, and even the overblown melodramatics almost make sense in the context of what is, at root, a fable. But as the movie rolls on, gathering in ridiculousness, the juxtaposition of a muddy realist aesthetic with glaring plot implausibilities and flagrant historical make-believe jarrs; disbelief can be suspended no longer. And that’s before the climatic Saving Private Ryan battle against the French on Dover beach, complete with slo-mo and underwater shots and, inexplicably, a raggedy gang of creepy Lord of the Flies kids who’ve been hanging out in Sherwood Forest to no obvious plot purpose up to this point. How they got from said Forest to Dover riding Shetland ponies in a miraculously short space of time is left to the viewer’s imagination.

As you’d expect from Ridley Scott, this is an atmospheric and good-looking movie, with lovingly-detailed castles and some beautiful sweeping shots over our green and pleasant land. The foreground, however, is over-powered by Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett, whose commanding presences find no foil in the cartoonish villains, and - with the exception of Max von Sydow as Robin’s pretend father - are not cushioned by characters in the supporting roles: the Merry Men, Friar Tuck and the Sheriff of Nottingham are reduced to bit players. Worse, the moral crux of the tale has been discarded. This Robin is a republican but no social revolutionary. England’s kings are rotten – even Richard, who is here stripped of his customary romanticisation – but her nobles, old and motheaten as they may be, are still noble; what is Robin himself but a natural-born leader? He tries to force what appears to be a proto-Magna Carta on King John, and favours political reform in step with the nobility; radical wealth redistribution is not on the agenda.

This is a fighting movie and a Hollywood love story, and it’s gripping enough until it collapses under the weight of its ludicrous pomposity. But just as the Major Oak has been cut from the story, so too has its socialistic heart been excised.