robin hood

Turns out I sort of lied when I said I would only do the one film I enjoyed that we watched at my dad's. The other films we watched were a film called Zathura, which is essentially Jumanji in space (it's deliberately that - the book it's based on is the sorta sequel to Jumanji, and you shouldn't think it's rubbish because I describe that way or because I'm not reviewing it - it was actually surprisingly good - it's just I need to get caught up) and the Russell Crow/Ridley Scott version of Robin Hood.

The reason I wasn't going to review this one was simply because I couldn't remember what it was we watched. A more accurate way to put it might be that it was sufficiently poor that I blanked it out.

The main problem with it, I think, was that it wasn't really Robin Hood.

Now actually the Robin Hood that tends to be thought of as being 'proper' Robin Hood isn't actually the original Robin Hood. The Hood of the original stories was an outlaw who robbed from the rich, but past that everything else, from the giving to the poor to being Earl of Loxley and Prince John and Richard the Lionheart - all that - is actually a later update.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they should have made that original story, what I'm really getting at is that they've made neither. They haven't gone back to that original source, nor have they made a new version of the more familiar rich-poor-currency-interface story.

Instead they've kind of taken elements and grafted them onto another story. If this were set in another time period and you changed the characters names, it might just have worked. It could have worked in the sense that you'd have had familiar elements that would have been references for you to pick up.

Instead, by calling it Robin Hood, you end up with something that feels like they threw something together around the themes.

It doesn't help that the story lacks any real compelling element to it (and unfortunately relies heavily on coincidence). For example, I'm not sure if it's deliberate, but they seem to be trying to muddy the waters as to who the bad guys are and quite what their motives are. Rather than the simple antagonist of the bad Prince John, there's something here about the French.

It even goes to the extent at the end of having the French invade. Only it's a pretty crap invasion and also... well, it actually looks like the D-day landings as covered by the beginning of Saving Private Ryan. And I mean it properly looks like them - the French apparently had very similar landing craft to the allies in 1945.

Which is a big part of its problem - why are the French even part of it and why are they staging a reconstruction of the D-Day landings in Ye Olde England?

It's just confused and confusing.

Oh, and Russell Crow's accent is all over the place.