Robin Hood (2018)
Directed by Otto Bathurst
A war-hardened Crusader and his Moorish commander mount an audacious revolt against the corrupt English crown.
6 connections found
View:
6 films that influenced Robin Hood
What critics say influenced Robin Hood
But when your climactic showdown kind of feels like the bank robbery prologue to The Dark Knight , right down to musical cues sounding like they were lifted from said film, a closer eye is going to start breaking the whole comparison down that much quicker.
Having apparently watched Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur over someone’s shoulder on a flight and used the CTRL+F function on Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight script to replace the name ‘Batman’ for ‘Robin Hood,’ Otto Bathurst’s latest iteration of the folklore legend arrives in cinemas.
The direction and writing leave a lot to be desired, particularly when it comes to the action sequences (DID YOU KNOW BOWS ARE JUST LIKE GUNS IF YOU SHOOT THE ARROWS FAST ENOUGH?!?!) and because the whole movie blatantly steals its best beats from The Dark Knight, but I just don’t care.
It plays like a fan fiction written by an edgelord teen who’s seen The Dark Knight too many times and who knows what Anonymous is but doesn’t understand it.
The latest retelling of Western mythology’s favorite redistributor of wealth is a thoroughly incoherent movie salad that overlays the iconography of Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and the war in Afghanistan onto a proudly anachronistic retelling of the hero’s origin story, and overlays that onto 90 percent of the plot of The Dark Knight.
There are points in the narrative when Robin Hood is Batman, or the Scarlet Pimpernel, and another point where an important central character literally becomes Two Face in almost the exact way it happens during 2008’s The Dark Knight .
The archery, the sword fighting, the leaping off of buildings…it all reminded me of the film Assassin’s Creed starring Michael Fassbender.
A loaded orphan who lives in a giant keep above a mining town, Robin spends his time dressing up as a thief and perfecting his “Assassin’s Creed” cosplay as he skulks around the local barns.
This is the new “Robin Hood” for a generation that grew up on superhero movies and “Assassin’s Creed,” and it fails on almost every level.
Like Guy Ritchie’s recent, slightly less terrible variation on King Arthur, the film owes more to Assassin’s Creed than it does to any ancient chronicles.
If the action is a speed-ramped eyesore, supplying Robin’s arrow-firing exploits the fast-slow-fast cadence of a Zack Snyder superhero brawl, the overriding aesthetic is closer to Assassin’s Creed : Decked out in a darker, more fashionable shade of green, Egerton’s hooded prince of thieves races across the rooftops and narrow wooden walkways of a Nottingham that seems to have been city-planned with parkour in mind.
Director Otto Bathurst (best known for helming a few episodes of Peaky Blinders ) handles the slo-mo arrow slingin’ action shots with aplomb but also seems to have also followed the path of Guy Ritchie’s latest King Arthur movie.
It’s rather ironic that Robin Hood ‘s insistence on wanting to be something new leaves it ultimately feeling like something we’ve seen countless times before – last year’s ill-advised King Arthur go-around from Guy Ritchie being the most likely comparison piece.
Unlike, the stylish reimagining of 2017’s King Arthur, Robin Hood balances the line between style and story.
But the news that Robin Hood is barely in double digits on Rotten Tomatoes was hard to avoid, and so I went to my Wednesday night preview screening ready for another King Arthur -style debacle.
Directed by long time TV journeyman Otto Bathurst, and scripted by Ben Chandler and David James Kelly, Robin Hood is a stylistically confusing mesh of Guy Ritchie inspired, lad bloke period dramatics (ala King Arthur ) and steam punk aesthetic, that fails in its attempt to be “visually daring”.
Political disruption is central to this version of the tale, right up to the point where Egerton has to deliver a speech about wealth redistribution to a slum full of what kind of look like the ravers from The Matrix Reloaded .
Advertisement
If there was one thing I wasn’t expecting during the first 45 minutes of Otto Bathurst’s Robin Hood , it was how much it reminded me of Cobalt Neural 9 , a now-legendary sci-fi project that the Wachowski siblings were readying right around the same time they were trying to get Cloud Atlas off of the ground.
The same thinking has underpinned several other films (Baz Luhrmann’s “The Great Gatsby” comes to mind as a recent example), but here it feels silly and strained.