Upon his return, he finds his property seized by the evil Sheriff of Nottingham (Mendelsohn, taking the Rickman route). Egerton’s Robin Hood is a self-professed “spoilt toff”, living it up in his manor with new squeeze Marian (in this version, she is a poor thief), until he is “drafted” to fight in the Crusades. Scott’s version cleverly sidestepped the issue by making Robin a commoner who assumes a nobleman’s identity. Is Robin Hood really fighting for social justice, or just to regain what has been taken from him? He is for the people, but not of the people a champagne socialist who practices philanthropy with other people’s money. Maid Marian is also a member of the nobility – in Prince of Thieves she is King Richard’s cousin. His social standing and superior archery skills (and better hair) make him the natural leader of the Merry Men. He is typically referred to Sir Robin of Loxley, a wealthy landowner. There’ is also the fact that Robin is no starving peasant himself, but a nobleman. Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn in Robin and Marian. So, overthrowing John and the Sheriff of Nottingham will set the people free by returning them to the past. Richard is supposedly a good king who ruled fairly, and Robin yearns for his return, which closes the story in many movie versions. As the legend goes, Prince John and co are only in power because his brother, Richard the Lionheart, is away fighting the Crusades. In fact, he seeks to restore the status quo. True, he seeks to overthrow John and the sheriff’s corrupt regime, but he has no ambitions to replace it with some socialist utopia. Critics may say he does little more than right the system’s wrongs on a local, superficial level, which is as good as validating it. You could question how much change Robin really wants, however. You could describe him as a Marxist guerrilla, a left-leaning populist – or perhaps even as a progressive-taxation radical. He is usually depicted as an outlaw on the side of the oppressed and overtaxed poor, whom he leads in a popular rebellion against the Sheriff of Nottingham, Prince John, the corrupt church and their rich, idle cronies. Starting with the basics (and ignoring the disputed real-life history), robbing the rich to give to the poor suggests Robin Hood is in favour of wealth redistribution. Is Robin Hood’s problem the material itself? The closer one looks, the more contradictory the myth becomes. Instead, he bores us without the history. “I could bore you with the history, but you wouldn’t listen,” says Egerton in the prologue. Egerton described it as a “gritty, modern retelling of the story for a superhero audience”, which means a Batman/Bruce Wayne-type vigilante hero, some lavish action scenes and anachronisms including modern haute couture and roulette tables. The new Robin Hood manages to be the same old story and a revamp too far. The tradition continues with the latest version: Foxx’s “John” is a Moor who follows Robin back from the Crusades. Robin of Sherwood was believed to be part of the original myth by the makers of Prince of Thieves, hence Morgan Freeman’s Moorish sidekick, Azeem. Robin has fared better on the small screen, in a family friendly, Saturday-evening kind of way, via the late-00s BBC version and the mid-1980s Robin of Sherwood on ITV, which introduced into the lore some pagan mysticism and an Arab Muslim character, Nasir (played by the white English actor Mark Ryan, but it is the sentiment that counts). And Disney’s 1973 version remains one of the studio’s least cherished animated movies. Richard Lester’s 1976 Robin and Marian, with Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn, at least took the story to a different, albeit less dynamic, place – they could have called it Middle Aged in the Middle Ages. Patrick Bergin’s and Uma Thurman’s cheaper, muddier version suffered for being released the same year. The most entertaining thing about the movie now is Alan Rickman’s scenery-chewing departures from the cheesy script, but it became the second-highest-grossing movie of 1991. Crowe responded: “You’ve got dead ears, mate,” and walked out of the interview in a huff.īefore that, we had Kevin Costner’s inexplicably successful Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, which brought little new to the table beyond Bryan Adams and hair product. The glumness of the whole exercise was summed up in a BBC radio interview when Mark Lawson asked Crowe if he was going for an Irish accent in the film (because it sure didn’t sound like an English one). The story at least attempted to integrate myth and history (to the point where Robin inspires Magna Carta), but it jettisoned all notions that Robin and his men were ever knowingly “merry”. Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe’s 2010 Robin Hood felt as if it wanted to be a Gladiator remake. Recent efforts have not served the myth well.
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