In the Hood

Ridley Scott's Robin Hood is like none we've ever seen. And that's not necessarily a good thing.

by Shaun Brady

ROBIN QUIVERS: Russell Crowe's Robin Hood is all dour grimaces and rough charm, unlike other, more roguish Robins.

[ CITY PAPER GRADE: B- ]

The 21st-century epic is a rather dingy thing. The pendulum long ago swung from the bloodless spectacles to a dogmatic celebration of "realism" — which translates to the most mangled body parts that CGI can buy, suffered during battles waged in wretched conditions by warriors with even more wretched hygiene.

It's debatable whether legendary tales should be held to the same standards of historically accurate squalor as stories culled from real life, but Ridley Scott makes his case with a nearly unrecognizable Robin Hood. The move from Technicolor green tights to soiled earth tones accompanies the most dour Robin to ever draw a bow, whose men are merry only when indulging in sweaty, drunken debauches at the nearest tavern. Gone are the rakish grin of an Errol Flynn or the mischievous acrobatics of a Douglas Fairbanks (and, yes, the mullet of a Kevin Costner, but that goes without saying).

Russell Crowe possesses just the right rough-hewn charm to earn a place among that Hollywood rogues' gallery, but here his features are almost perpetually frozen in a hangdog scowl. He seems to spark to life a bit whenever fixed by the piercing stare of Cate Blanchett's steely Maid Marion, but even their romance is bloated by a few too many trots through the bucolic English countryside.

Scott is a filmmaker with an eye for grand scales, so the guerrilla tactics which made Robin's name would never appeal as much as the battles that preceded his outlaw days. The retooling has made it much easier to shoehorn the story into the boilerplate "setpiece sandwich" now standard for blockbusters — huge action scenes at beginning and end, with plenty of sword-fight skirmishes and arrows thacking into flesh to fill the interim between evil plotting and palace intrigues. This Robin Hood kicks off with a castle siege and culminates in a French invasion that seems to transplant Saving Private Ryan's storming of Normandy into medieval garb.

Instead of the usual tales of derring-do, he offers an origin story complete with troubled past and unrealized glory — with "Rise and rise again, until lambs become lions" the 12th-century equivalent to "With great power comes great responsibility." The hero doesn't steal from the rich to give to the poor until halfway through and the band only takes up residency in Sherwood Forest as the credits roll.

Instead, Robin becomes a sort of freedom fighter, whether critiquing Richard the Lionheart's slaughter of Muslims in the Crusades or taking up his long-lost father's Charter of Rights to oppose King John's taxation. (Which would seem to place him on diametrically opposed sides of today's political spectrum, by accident or design.) He comes off more Braveheart than Prince of Thieves, but there appears to be a franchise being established that could remedy that.

(s_brady@citypaper.net)