Robin Hood: Film Review

Robin Hood: Film Review

Cast: Taron Egerton, Jamie Foxx, Jamie Dornan, Ben Mendelsohn, Eve Hewson, Tim Minchin
Director: Otto Bathurst

This is not the story you know.

So intones the voiceover that bookends the 2018 version of Robin Hood, a quite frankly baffling piece of film that seems intent on making a Call Of Duty version of the myth, and setting it against a backdrop of 80s rock video pyrotechnics.

Egerton is Robin of Loxley, a Lord of the manor of Nottingham, whose life is changed when he's drafted up to the crusades and torn from the love of his life Marian (Hewson, at times channelling a younger Emily Blunt). On returning injured from the Crusades, Robin (Rob to his mates, bizarrely) finds he's been declared dead - and teaming up with Foxx's John, he begins to rob from the Sheriff of Nottingham's war taxes to help.

But John advises him the best way to upset the apple cart, is to cosy up to the sheriff...

The 2018 version of Robin Hood is a film that's more about the fast cuts, and action than the subtlety and nuance of other versions.

Mixing comedy as well, Robin Hood feels like a hybrid of so many different elements from its Iraq war style Crusades opening through to its death-metal pyrotechnics; nothing quite gels as it should.

And while Egerton delivers a variant of his Kingsman character, and gives The Hood some vigilante justice elements that wouldn't feel out of place in a CW series, there's very much a feeling of Foxx playing Alfred to Egerton's Bruce Wayne in the start of Batman Begins.

There's a hint of Bathurst playing fast and loose with style here and trying to set up a sort of Robin Hood cinematic universe (implied by its end), but what transpires is a film that flounders for any identity of its own, other than a downpat action wannabe.

It's set up well as an idea, but Robin Hood fails to hit the mark as much as it should, making it feel like a splendid misfire more than anything else.