In short: Robin Hood (2018)

This godawful thing directed by Otto Bathurst is a sad attempt at making the Robin Hood legend “topical”. So expect crusaders in the Middle East carrying their bows as if they were assault rifles while wearing armour that’s meant to look like modern combat armour, our main character wearing a leather hoodie that makes him look rather a lot like the TV version of a certain Robin Hood inspired superhero, and a lot more in the spirit of an idiot’s idea of modernist theatre. Now, this sort of thing can be perfectly interesting – if perhaps not exactly what I’d want from a Robin Hood movie – if written with thought and care, but the responsible parties for the script, Ben Chandler and David James Kelly, treat their conceit with all the thoughtfulness and care of elephants waltzing through a porcelain store, never having encountered a thought they’d be able to actually follow through on.

Because this isn’t bad enough, the film’s plot is, absurdly enough, full of the worst attempts at your typical superhero movie’s narrative beats I’ve seen in quite some time, because obviously, it’s not enough for this one to be a shitty message movie, it also needs to be a really bad medieval superhero movie, too, with dialogue so bad, I started to fondly think about the Daredevil movie with Ben “I can’t do superheroes for the life of me” Affleck as the much superior film.


But hey, at least there’s some spectacle on screen, right? Well, unfortunately not, for Bathurst shoots the whole mess as if it actually were the amateur theatre production its writing reminds me of (probably mumbling something about Brechtian techniques), having never encountered a set he can’t make look like cardboard, and no action scene he can’t turn into nonsense by always choosing the least effective set-up, the worst camera angle, and so on and so forth. It’s honestly astonishing to me how a production that’s made by an actual production company and a director with experience in properly budgeted modern TV can look quite this shoddy. Need I even mention that the actors make the impression of having gotten no direction at all, so their performances meander wildly, with only Jamie Foxx actually giving the impression of playing the same character from scene to scene?