I suppose you could call this the Robin Hood of “my” generation, in that director Kevin Reynolds’ take on Nottingham’s most famous bandit came out when I was just barely a teenager. But I use the term loosely, for I’d been familiar with Errol Flynn’s Robin since early childhood. I saw this in my local movie theatre, long since closed down and converted into a nightclub, when it represented the cutting edge of big-budget, revisionist takes on playful, shop-worn fare. It came out a couple of years after Tim Burton’s Batman had become the gold standard of such reinventions. Reynolds, coming from his surprisingly good war flick The Beast (1988), brought to the project a flashy visual technique filled with showy crane and steadicam work. This also commenced his short-lived, finally calamitous partnership with star Kevin Costner. Reynolds offered a tangled, misty, drably naturalistic Anglo-Norman England, with such minor imagistic alterations as relocating Robin’s combat with Little John (Nick Brimble) over right of way on a river crossing from a log to a stony ford above a cascade, as part of a broad stab at bringing a grittier sensibility to a legend so long swathed in lincoln-green hose. The results anticipated Mel Gibson’s similarly realistic yet oddly bland, detail-deficient sense of medieval grime.
Most reminiscences about this Robin Hood these days invoke Costner’s embarrassing miscasting, his Midwestern drawl ever so slightly suppressed in favour of the faintest of Anglophonic melodies, but still often sounding like he’s from no further east than St Louis. Very occasional moments, as when Robin looks through a telescope for the first time and instinctively lashes out with his sword at far distant enemies, suggest the comedic touch Costner had shown in Silverado and Bull Durham had not been entirely lost. Costner, to be fair, tries to maintain a low-key, soulful mix of emotional seriousness and down-to-earth heroism, which doesn’t compensate for his obvious shortcomings, and the result is that his performance almost entirely lacks the kind of swagger such a role demands. Costner makes declamatory speeches about as inspiring as a high school principal’s PA broadcasts about changes to the lunch menu, and lacks convincing physical dynamism or grace: quite often he looks rather bloated and ill-at-ease. Not helping is his period version of heavy metal mullet haircut, contrasting co-star Christian Slater’s boy-band bangs, in a film that otherwise has pretensions to authenticity.
Whilst Costner makes for just about the stodgiest swashbuckler in screen history, the film around him, which I had remembered as being a fairly solid adventure flick, not only doesn’t hold up, but is today clearly a mess, roughly cobbled together by hacks from then still-recent popular models. Elements of satiric comedy, horror-movie thrills with dead villains who come back to life and spring out of hiding, shallow black magic pizazz, and confused politically correct pandering jostle for attention. The reflexive efforts to jazz up the myth for the ‘90s seem, in spite of the fact that period romance and derring-do is the whole damned point of our affection for the tale, sees the story bedecked with multiple varieties of revisionist shtick. Violent contrasts in tone result, between lumpen revenge melodrama, taken by rote from any number of ‘80s action flicks, and a tongue-in-cheek contemporised send-up. The latter aspect revolves mostly around Alan Rickman’s puckish villainy as the Sheriff of Nottingham, throwing himself about with rubbery motions, reciting traditional villain’s speeches and backstory motives with obvious boredom, before casually commanding his serving girls to come prostrate their themselves on his bed at scheduled times, and to “bring a friend”.
The dialogue, in this fashion, wavers from familiar faux-period affectations, spiced with plenty of “thous” and “thines”, to random humour-value anachronisms like “shaddup” and “fuck me!” This schismatic approach, whilst it looked kind of hip back in 1991, just looks lazy now, the product of a production team taking an each-way bet. Lazy also applies to the two most overt devices for suggesting trendy concessions. Robin was of course supplied here with a Moor offsider, Azeem (Morgan Freeman), bound to fight with Robin until he can repay his life debt for Robin’s rescuing him from an Arab prison in Jerusalem, bringing some street cred to the 1100s ‘hood, and Freeman, to his credit, plays his role with a clean, clear sense of dry comic timing and emotive intensity. But the culture-clash humour and half-hearted social commentary that the film builds around him is silly. A counter-productive joke about Azeem taking time out for his prayers during a fight displays an opportunistic ignorance of the customs the filmmakers are making fun of. Azeem then has five minutes’ worth of dramatic tension with this version’s hearty, kegger-loving edition of Friar Tuck (Michael McShane), who seems as much influenced by Animal House’s Bluto as anything else.
Azeem proves that, gosh darn it, some of them Moors were pretty clever people, because Azeem introduces these Anglo-Saxon whelps to the aforementioned telescope, gunpowder, and exotic procedures for dealing with obstetrical problems. Whilst such touches may be intended to elucidate the way encounters with Eastern civilization during the Crusades had a revolutionary effect on Western Europe at the wane of the Dark Ages, they do so with specifically unlikely devices. This seems little more than an excuse to turn Azeem into Robin’s Q, offering useful gadgets for some steam-punk (Oakwood-punk? Illuminated manuscript-punk?) ass-kicking, and he’s really only present because the terse salt-and-pepper friendship was so cool in Lethal Weapon and Die Hard. Sample dialogue: “He is a savage,” Robin says in defending Azeem, and then after a suitably pregnant, meaningful pause, “But no more than you or I.” Wow, the bastard’s a philosopher. Maid Marian (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) is introduced here as a masked, lethal fighting ninja chick, who assaults Robin when comes to pay homage to her, having promised her brother he would look after her as he died in Robin’s arms back in Jerusalem.
This introduction, as well as being spectacularly insensible, proves to have little actual relevance to Marian’s portrayal in the rest of the film, as a feisty-spirited but still easy-to-victimise pawn between Robin and Nottingham. The latter tries to rape her after a hasty wedding ceremony, and she’s reduced to hiding in a window frame and jabbing the villain with paltry weapons when he comes close enough. The Marian of pre-Victorian Robin Hood tales was a warrior-woman, but this film is a stark reminder of just how perplexing a notion that was for Hollywood not twenty years ago. Just as stupid is the subplot of the Sheriff being a Satanist, the son of his in-house witch (the great Geraldine McEwan, who at least seems to have some fun with her part) who conspired to have him brought up by a noble family. Bad guys are more obviously bad when they’re sons of witches. Guy of Gisbourne, rather than a silken, more vividly threatening counterpoint to Nottingham’s buffoonery, a la Basil Rathbone’s, is instead a barely competent boob (in spite of casting the innately menacing Michael Wincott) who gets iced by his cousin Nottingham when the time comes to assert Nottingham’s genuine bad-assedness, and provide a shock middle-act death.
Worse yet, the film essentially throws away vital aspects of the legendary tale: the necessity of ransoming back Richard from the Austrians is discarded as a detail, and the social division between Saxons and Normans not mentioned at all, in spite of the fact that could have blended well with the even greater disparity Azeem’s presence offers for suggesting the way ethnic prejudice can be used by power. Such politicking seems to have been judged as too complicated for a 1991 action film, and it doesn’t help the rather shoddy recreation of the period setting. Nottingham is attempting some sort of torturous coup, with Prince John left out, apparently because someone thought the audience couldn’t handle such complicated politics. Beginning the film in a Jerusalem prison seemed relevant at the time, considering the Iran hostage drama was still ongoing then, and the first Iraq War was playing out: whilst the film offers nice guy Islamic hero Azeem, he’s black and beautiful, whilst the Arabs are sweat-dripping hero-chaining thugs slicing off hands with careless enthusiasm.
So what, if anything, is still salvageable from this mess? Michael Kamen’s excellent score, yes. There’s an interesting sub-plot in Will Scarlett’s (Slater) characterisation as a cynical, angry proletarian who is actually Robin’s half brother, Robin himself having been generally disliked by everyone as a “spoilt bully” when he was a callow youngster, one who sabotaged his father’s (Brian Blessed) comforting romance with Will’s mother after his own mother’s death. Slater’s casting as Will, completely contemporary in his manner and speech, seems designed to channel some Young Guns-ish youth relevance and pimply outrage (very appropriate in the year “Smells Like Teen Spirit” hit large) as well as fulfilling a similar function as Matthew Broderick’s casting in the greatly superior Ladyhawke (1985). Reynolds does offer some clever touches in his depiction as to how Robin’s campaign of guerilla warfare works. The Merrie Men’s forest abode, with its skyline rope bridges and treetop huts, seems more Ewok than Saxon, but it makes for the film’s most interesting visuals and best action scene, when the lair is discovered and assaulted by a horde of crazy Celts (obviously Glasgow Rangers supporters), with some dramatic stunt work on show. Rickman’s turn tends to be the most fondly remembered aspect of this film, but in revisiting it I found his performance of a unit with the unevenness of effect and intent around him, particularly apparent in the director’s cut. Like Jack Nicholson’s similar turn in Batman, Rickman seems to be giving less a truly great absurdist performance, than offering the spectacle of a frustrated and talented actor with clout mucking about in a fashion that reveals to the audience he knows he’s trapped in a degrading context. It’s hard to deny, however, that the tossed-off relish of his explanation of why he wants to cut Robin’s heart out with a spoon, his falsely reassuring demeanour to Guy just before knifing him in the guts, or the way he advises the surgeon stitching up a wound to his face to “keep the stitches small!”, is ebullient ham. What the film might have become if Rickman had played Robin is nice to think about.
Mastrantonio’s Marian, although far too contemporary in style (like everyone else), is however perhaps more substantial in quality: her heartfelt scream of Robin’s name when he launches his attempt to save the day is the film’s lone connection to real emotional imperative. Even if Reynolds’ sense of style is subdued to the point of tedium, and the staging often poor, he does offer some neat moments of visual hype, like Robin firing an arrow before a background of boiling flame, the (much sent-up) arrow’s-eye shot of one of his arrows speeding to its mark, the genuinely Fairbanksian daring when Robin and Azeem are catapulted over a castle wall, and the moment, fittingly quoted from The Vikings, when Robin launches himself through a stained-glass window. The very finish, at Robin and Marian’s interrupted wedding, possesses some of the same beauteous mythical style Reynolds brought to the poorly written but lovely-looking Tristan + Isolde, and Reynolds actually turned in a better camp blockbuster with Waterworld. The Adventures of Robin Hood is an ageless movie; Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves only reminds us how long ago 1991 was.
