It's also one of the best Robin Hood movies I've ever seen. It isn't difficult to make Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves look like a horrific joke played on the American public, but Robin Hood makes it look less like a joke and more like an actual assault on good taste, plotting, storyline, and acting ability. (A film that plays a rape scene for a joke is already down in the hole; Robin Hood puts the boot in.) In fact, it makes Excalibur - not that slouchy a film - look bad by comparsion.
The amazing thing is that it changes the core story of Robin Hood by about half a percentage. Instead of being a merry outlaw, Robin Hode is a Saxon noble whose defense of a poaching miller offends the villainous Miles Falconet - a Norman - resulting in Hode being dragged before Baron Daugerre, the local Norman lord. Falconet wants his pound of flesh for Hode's failure to let him blind the miller for poaching; Daguerre, however, imposes a penalty of a public apology and a single lash for insulting the local nobles. Hode, however, is too hotheaded and frustrated with Norman rule to let that sit, loudmouths himself up to fifty lashes, and then makes his escape with Will Scarlet to become an outlaw. (The ethnic tension between the Saxon ruled and the Norman rulers is the central engine of the conflict, rather than being purely a class battle between the rich and the poor.)
You already know how the story goes. Little John leads Robin to a group of ragged outlaws, slowly molds them into a force to oppose Daguerre's clumsy tyranny, steal from the rich, recruits Friar Tuck, gives to the poor, yanks the nose of the Sheriff at every opportunity and eventually wins his battle against the tyranny of the unjust. You've seen this story before, hopefully in a version that didn't star Kevin Costner or his godawful American accent.
It's hard to describe the tone that the scenes have. Actually, the entire movie's ethos is summarized in a single scene: The Sheriff, trying to smoke Robin Hood out of hiding, has a noose around the neck of a couple of peasant children, threatening to hang them if Robin doesn't show up. A couple of Robin's men pop out of hiding, put arrows into the hangmen - who obligingly overact their death scenes - Robin and Will ride up and free the kids, while the Sheriff and his men are left to scuttle away from an angry, rock-throwing mob. It's a scene that last for about a minute and a half - and yet in the space of that minute, we essentially get a complete summary of Robin Hood's heroism. (Compare that, for instance, to Pirates of the Carribbean 3, which opens with a leaden pirate genocide, including a ten-year old kid.)
The movie doesn't reinvent stuff for the sake of reinvention; it tilts certain aspects just far enough to be unique, but leaves the stuff that works alone. For instance, the addition of the tension between Normans and Saxons is the driving force behind Robin's actions, rather than the villainy of King John. Baron Daguerre wants to keep the peace between the two, but Robin's rash inability to accept a compromise forces Daguerre to outlaw him. Robin is not a purely moral figure until he realizes that his actions were less motivated by justice and more by his own shortsightedness. But the Sheriff is still a local tyrant, and Prince John - in a brief appearance - is too happy with Richard's absence from the throne for comfort, repeatedly reassuring everybody that Richard is not coming back and that he's in charge. Daguerre is still a villain - preferring to squeeze the peasantry rather than to tap into his own financial resources, as one of Prince John's (interestingly played) lackies point outs - but he's also caught in a situation that he can't really control.
It is a really good film. There are a couple of holes. One of them is Miles Falconet, played by Jurgen Prochnow. He's the obvious villain of the piece, but it's almost possible to feel sorry for him when Maid Marian tells him to his face that she doesn't want him. Daguerre is more interested in the marriage than Falconet appears to be, and her insults about his lechery seem odd when we don't see him ever really being, you know, lecherous. He's also sporting a fairly thick French accent - which makes sense, he's Norman, but I can't help but to be reminded of Will Ferrell's description of a French accent in Talladega Nights as sounding like a dog trying to get peanut butter off the top of its mouth. He seems to be described as a bad person more often than he acts as a bad person.
Uma Thurman plays Maid Marian as a woman who's essentially too proud to be forced into the role of a pawn in an arranged marriage, which is anachronistic - Lord only knows it's a useful trick in Medieval: Total War - but she also comes off as a bit of a brat, like another review points out. Halfway through the movie, she pulls a trick that would seem pretty hoary in any other context, but Uma's acting skills manage to pull it off pretty well. (The reveal of her status to Robin is actually one of the best moments in the movie.) That being said, it seems like the entire point of her character is to fall in love with Robin Hood; she's given strong things to do, but it never feels like she has goals of her own after she's been freed from the machinations of others.
The movie makes up for any weaknesses with a couple of characters who are given excellent scenes. Friar Tuck, for instance, an afterthought in Prince of Thieves, gets two of the best lines in the movie, both of them at the end, both of them death scenes. Halfway through the film, a bowyer - carrying longbows to Daguerre - intercepts and hides Robin Hood, and essentially steals the entire scene out from underneath the leads. (I love his reaction to Robin's joke that the vaunted longbow could shoot around corners.) It's a short scene, but the actor carries it like a pro.
What ties the whole movie together is its visual design, which is about as Warhammer Fatntasy-ish as you can get. The skies are constantly overcast, the gloom is palpable, and the costume design is amazing. Robin's Merry Men look like camp followers and scavengers, their clothing ragged and bloody, their hair in dirty knots. The soldiers dress in gear that looks to my eyes like an exact reproduction of medieval armor - leather padding and a conical helmet - while the nobles, the richest people in the realm, look like they're wearing clothing that was tailored to within an inch of its life just to look halfway good. Everything is in dull, autumnal tones, everything is gloomy, everything is gray; you can't ask for a better visual representation of the Warhammer world, mohawks aside. Particularly of interest are the costumes for the Feast of Fools at the end of the movie, which are just begging to be inspiration for miniatures, or as a color guide when you're painting up your Bretonnian peasants. (It's also a useful way to show how to use colors that are very close to each other rather than the sharply contrasting hues of most Warhammer paint jobs. I haven't tried it yet, so there might be a reason why they use such contrasting colors.)
And the ending is particularly good. Prochnow milks his death scene for all that it's worth, but Friar Tuck gets in a wicked closing line at his expense. (You can imagine that it's not a spoiler that the main villain dies. No playing of "One Tin Soldier" while Robin's corpse sinks into a bog.) But the final conflict between Will Scarlet and Daguerre ends with something that you will probably not see in a movie for, say, the next twenty years or so - and it's exactly that scene that catapults the movie from a simple Robin Hood pastiche into something much more than the sum of its parts. And the last scene adds a visual element that we didn't even realize was missing from the entire film, brilliantly counterpointing everything that came up to that point.
I could have written this review much earlier, but there's a central problem involved: This movie is hella obscure, and like I said, most people don't even know that it exists. But a few days ago, Netflix added it to their Instant Play roster, which I trust that everybody has at this point. If you don't, shame on you. (It's like $10 for unlimited play and a single disc, it's chock full of excellent material - four seasons of The Office, two seasons of 30 Rock, nine of South Park, three of the updated Doctor Who, plus bazillions of movies - and you can use it to turn your XBox into essentially an iPod that plays movies. Get it.) You can find it here, watch the whole thing, see if you agree with me.
What you're seeing there is the truncated version of the movie; apparently the British version was 150 minutes, as opposed to the American/Netflix version coming in at a lean 104. I would have to see both versions in order to figure out which is better, but I'm thinking that the rather severe editing of the American version works in the movie's favor. The editing is drum-tight; I imagine that Robin's rescue of the children was much longer in the British version, but the American version's economy of movement recreates a classic scene without needing to engage in a dozen dull following shots of Robin's archers getting into position, the nooses being tightened around the children's necks, so on and so forth. (Was there a similar scene in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves? I remember it sucking...)
So: it'll cost you next to nothing to watch, it's a brilliant film, it has a bunch of good scenes and no real bad ones, and despite a couple of hinks, it's as close to a definitive modern version of Robin Hood as you're going to get. At worst, you're out the cost of a full movie ticket for one person; at best, you have an instant visual resource for your players attached to an amazing movie.
What do you have to lose?
-Darren MacLennan
