Some might justly wonder where the devil I’ve been. It’s best that I not say, exactly, mostly because the answer would be incredibly boring. It’s enough to say that I’m back, for the umpteenth time, and – as you might expect – I have something about which to complain.
I had hoped to offer a review of Ridley Scott’s new adaptation of the long-standing Robin Hood mythos, but, as I’ve stated before elsewhere, it’s rare that I’ll review movie about which I have no especially strong feelings. Why else would I take the time? What would be gained? “It was alright, I guess; it’s up to you” isn’t the sort of thing I feel like taking a thousand words to say.
So, no review of Robin Hood – save this: it was a mysterious failure. The film suffered from an apparent attempt to make two movies at once (neither of them the story of Robin Hood, as it turns out), and what seemed like it would be excellent turned out to be a middling mess that combined the medium parts of The Last Samurai and A Knight’s Tale with the worst parts of Kingdom of Heaven and Braveheart. That’s by no means a terrible movie, sure, but it’s not great either. Rent it, maybe. 6/10.
That’s all I’d say about it, mostly, but for the fact of Harry Knowles. Harry, as some of you may know, is the proprietor of the basically successful entertainment news site, Ain’t It Cool News, to which I have frequently linked. He has a stable of good reviewers and fact checkers, to be sure, and the fact that he’s on good terms with many well-placed industry figures has led to some interesting scoops and one-on-one promotions (like Q&A sessions between the site’s readers and the likes of Bruce Willis and Sylvester Stallone, both of whom are patrons there).
Anyway, he has a stable of good reviewers, as I said, but sometimes he decides to review things himself. Fair enough; if I had a site (woah, I do) I’d write my own reviews sometimes too. The trouble is that Harry Knowles, whatever he may be as a site-runner, an industry raconteur, and indeed as a man, is no writer. He’s apparently not very much on the ball in other areas, as we’ll see, but that’s what strikes one most as one reads his work. I say this with all of the easy confidence of one who is entirely obscure, but whatever.
Let’s get to the point. He published a review of Robin Hood (warning: some infrequent vulgarity) that attracted a fair amount of attention, and for all the wrong reasons. Primary among them is that it was negative, and if you know Harry’s usual stance on the things he reviews, this itself stands as an almost unprecedented anomaly. His near-orgasmic love for whatever he happens to watch is one of the reasons he operates a site devoted to movie news in the first place, and – let us be fair – his knowledge of the history of the medium is vast, and easily suited to the task of knowing what’s going on and what’s not.
Still, the review is atrocious. It’s an insult to reviews. I say this even though I agree with his general thesis, which is that the movie was not very good.
He begins by declaring that he’s apparently something of a Robin Hood purist even though he admittedly doesn’t care about almost any of the things that are most recognizable and famous about the story:
For me, it isn’t the stealing from the rich to give to the poor. That’s the populist hook. I’m also not a die-hard when it comes to the romance of Robin and Marion, though I do love that part of the story. Is it merely his Badassery with a Bow and a sword? Is it his merry band? The quarterstaff fight that happened to introduce him to his best friend Little John? No.
Fine, so what does he demand?
For me – when you boil everything away. What I love about the ROBIN HOOD mythology is the concept that Robin loved his king, so much – that when a plot to dispose of King Richard was hatched by his lesser brother, John… that it was a knight from the wrong side of the tracks – that helped to organize a revolt. That sought to protect those that could not protect themselves. He used terror to strike fear into the corrupt puppet government that was bleeding the people dry.
ROBIN HOOD, while being distinctly British as a story, is the very essence upon which the dream of America was formed… to me. When the government is unjust, it is the duty of its citizens to set it right, no matter how hard that road may be.
It is a lesson meant to empower a disenfranchised populace to demand more from their government. To become more involved. BUT at its heart, there is love for what their Government SHOULD be. There’s a patriotism that has a critical quality to it, that I just love.
Support, within reason.
A strange reason to support a story that, at its heart, is about wildly different things, but fair enough. It’s also odd that he savages the film even though this is the one element of the Robin Hood mythos that Scott & Co. emphasize – inordinately and bewilderingly emphasize, to be sure, to the point of claiming that Robin Hood’s father (a common stonemason) wrote the first draft of the Magna Carta. It’s truly baffling: Harry claims that X is the one thing about Robin Hood that he really demands. Scott & Co. do X – do it to the hilt. Harry declares that they’ve got no respect for the source material and don’t know anything about etc. etc. Incredible.
He’s right in complaining that Scott & Co. don’t really seem to like most of things that typically hover around Robin Hood stories. This is admittedly an origin story, but there’s still little about Russell Crowe’s Robin Hood (here Robin Longstride) that we’d easily recognize. He’s an archer, sure, but not an especially terrific one at first; his missed shot in the movie’s first quarter indirectly leads to King Richard’s death at Chalus-Chabrol. Indeed, he hardly arches much at all throughout the movie; he more often fights with the sword, or from horseback, and takes a war-hammer into the film’s climactic battle scene. I’m all for that, really, because war-hammers are awesome, but it’s not really a Robin Hood thing to do.
“Being old” is apparently not really a Robin Hood thing to do either, to hear Harry tell it. He can’t get over the fact that Russell Crowe is 47, and he demonstrates a pretty appalling misunderstanding of the old “age in olden days” canard:
Russell Crowe is 47 years old. That’s already 7 years older than the average life expectancy of a man living in the time of Robin Hood.
[...]
As I watched the film, it is evident that while Russell Crowe is obviously a man in his 40s – that in this version of the 12th Century – Man commonly lived into their late sixties – as is evidenced by characters throughout the film. I’m just gonna say it was a hard life and men aged faster than they do now – and a 46 year old man was probably the way your typical late twenties man would look in the 12th Century.
If you can make it through that prose without wincing and/or becoming momentarily confused, good for you. I like dashes as much as the next guy, but still…
Anyway, no, that’s not really how it would go at all. It’s not that dudes necessarily looked like old men in their late twenties or whatever just because 45 or so was the “average life expectancy.” The average life expectancy is irrelevant to this matter; it’s compiled based on both infant mortality and the fact that a lot of young men were in positions (primitive industry, war) that could lead to an early death. People weren’t living for roughly 45 years; that’s just the average. The neat thing about averages is that they can remain useful numbers even when they never, ever exist. Consider the notorious demographic situation of North America, that sees (or at least used to see) the average family having 2.5 children. Nobody could have 2.5 children; it’s simply impossible. It would be more fair to say that the common family had 2 or 3 children, but that’s less precise when it comes to breaking the numbers down.
All of which is a long-winded way of reiterating that men in their twenties did not look like they were in their late forties just because the “average life expectancy” happened to be lower then than it is now.
Harry moves on. Having declared his willingness to just sit back and take whatever Ridley Scott is looking to give him, he proceeds to harp on the most irrelevant details. He actually has the gall to complain that the script and character sheets – nothing in the world of the film itself – spell it as “Loxley” rather than “Locksley.” As if standardized spelling was the norm at the time and we have any right to make such a demand. As if it mattered.
The worst comes with a paragraph which I will reprint in full:
Meanwhile – King John is banging some French lady, a distant relative to the King of France. John has basically put Mark Strong in charge of collecting taxes – he’s essentially a Guy of Gisborne style bad guy – but called Godfrey – and Godfrey is working with the King of France to create Civil War in England, so France could just conquer. So – Godfrey is running around with a band of like 400 French soldiers, in French Uniforms – raping and pillaging, murdering and burning every small burg in the hill country of Northern England… And none of the retarded knights and lords of those areas notice the French folks killing, raping and burning – they just read the notice placed upon a town posting post – and decide they all need to kill the king.
To which I would retort:
1. This “French lady” is not some “distant relative” to Philip of France, but rather his favoured niece. Kind of a big deal.
2. “French uniforms” is a pretty ridiculous name for the non-descript attire in which the mercenaries were actually clad. And even so: Mercenaries? What? Oh right, nobles in this period used mercenaries all the time, so jeez, foreign uniforms, oh no. And – even at that – the civilian residents of Northern England are going to be so up on the latest developments that they’ll even know what a “French uniform” is?
3. Even at that, the fact that they were French is hardly an issue. Lots of people were French in England in 1190. Lots of people spoke that language exclusively. There are historical reasons for this that have been called Well-Known.
In a final analysis, I cannot agree with Harry that Robin Hood failed because Ridley Scott “drinks in historical detail” and the film was “hamstrung by the HISTORICAL FACTS of the day.” Scott’s drinking of historical detail – drunkenness, even – is aggravatingly selective, and seems to boil down to mostly wanting to show that all kings are bastards, unless they’re lepers, and that you’d best cast your lot in with the first improbable democrat that comes along. Scott’s eye for history is what sees this movie maintain that Magna Carta was drafted by some non-entity stonemason who was summarily executed for his troubles; that Richard the Lionhearted died years earlier than he actually died, while doing something he never did, for reasons that were ridiculous, as a result of events that conspicuously never happened; that the same Richard spoke English like a native, rather than scarcely at all; that speaking French was unusual or uncommon in England at the time, and a sign of dirty doings afoot; that Philip II himself could speak English well, let alone fluently; that Philip II was a sinister brooding figure rather than an immensely popular reformer; that Philip II secretly invaded England rather than only taking English holdings in what is now France; and so on and so on.
It’s a dumb movie, but that doesn’t justify a review in kind.
