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Robin Hood does something incredibly odd: it tries, vainly, to realistically depict an origin, and even make an argument for the reality behind, of a folk-tale. Robin Hood didn’t exist; he was merely a creation of folklore passed down through song from one generation to another. All of the sense of wonder, adventure, joy, and rabble-rousing anarchic cheer has been stripped away. Robin Hood is an insufferably boring retread of incredibly familiar tropes and iconography.
But it didn’t have to be this way. Robin Hood started life as a spec-script called Nottingham in which we are treated to a sympathetic sheriff as our heroic figure. He would have been emotionally torn between following a king who was corrupt and dipping into madness on one hand, and on the other would have had a vigilante running amok in the wilderness. It sounded like a clever, unique, and engaging reexamination of an oft-told tale. So, naturally, what we got was another version of the familiar.
Perhaps if Ridley Scott hadn’t tried to treat a myth, something he tackled so well in Legend’s directors cut, as a starting ground for historical accuracy and period-perfect detail we would have had something special. Instead, we’re given something that looks detailed and beautiful on the screen, but in its storytelling and heart is hollow and dull. And its revisionist slant on true history offers up no favors. It can’t get the myth right, or the actual history, so why treat it all so painfully serious?
Little is asked of the actors, but they try to create in this bore. It’s a triumph of cinematography, art direction and costuming. Otherwise, it’s a listless affair that just makes one long for the innocence and joyous joie de vive that Errol Flynn’s take on the character so perfectly captured. A myth is a myth, and trying to graft onto it anything of serious historical document or examination is going to make it collapse in on itself.
