Robin Hood

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After having seen 2018’s Robin Hood, the first logical conclusion I could come to was that this film should be studied. It’s difficult for me to explain. The best way I can describe this movie is that, at least it’s an interest kind of bad. For starters, all of these actors are trying. This is a talented cast (including the likes of Taron Egerton, Jamie Foxx, and Ben Mendelsohn). Even Jamie Dornan isn’t that bad in this movie. It sort of surprised me because I’m used to seeing him act dull and lifeless in the Fifty Shades movies. Mendelsohn is clearly the best part of the movie, even if it does look like he’s just sort of on autopilot. This movie is poorly paced, and horribly edited. I mean it is done to a point where I wasn’t sure what was going on half the time. The attempts to update this movie are laughable. The movie relies on gimmicks that have been old for about five years. For example, the movie has a lot of 300-style slow-mo action scenes. At least, the ones that I could make out were like that. The rest of them were a nauseating, shaky cam-laden mess. The filmmakers don’t really do anything new with these moments. Either way, it feels like more of the same, and kind of leaves me wondering why I should care. Some of the choices they make with the characters were different, to say the least. I think they wanted to make the Sheriff of Nottingham a paranoid xenophobe in addition to the greedy nature of his book counterpart. But, that was done better when the character was played by Alan Rickman. The movie opens with narration, and it serves absolutely no purpose. It’s something you could cut out of the film entirely, and it wouldn’t change the film either way. It’s also that generic “you don’t know the story” narration when a movie wants to show that it’s edgy. There were points where I did find the movie kind of dull. To be fair, there really weren’t that many to me. The big ones were the moments where I had to put up with the stupid love triangle, something that is quickly becoming one of my least favorite cliches. I also got this sense that they wanted to this movie where they made Robin Hood into a superhero. I don’t think the filmmakers realize that that is the basic story of the Green Arrow. Perhaps, the most misguided effort of this film is that it had aspirations to be another cinematic universe, without ever taking into account that Robin Hood is not a character (or world of characters) that this idea was ever going to work with. I almost want to recommend Robin Hood as this sort-of Frankenstein’s Monster of a movie. It’s stitched together by other, better stories and ideas. It just happens to be such a spectacular failure that it almost needs to be seen to be believed. 

2 / 10