Robin Hood

Hello all. I have some kind of stomach bug, so instead of photos of my adventures today you get another movie review. This time it's Robin Hood: the origin story that might as well have been an original picture.

Now, here's the thing. I went into this movie expecting not to like it. After all, my first exposure to the story was Disney's version, and I frickin' love that movie. I know it was low-budget and silly and turned everyone into anthropomorphic animals, but I didn't care. It's still one of my favorite Disney movies and I think it may have been the source of my bondage fetish.

Yeeeeaaahhh... 
Anyway, my first Robin Hood movie was ridiculous and lighthearted, so I wasn't expecting to like this darker-and-edgier version.

But after the first half-hour or so I had actually changed my mind. This was cool! It was playing a little fast and loose with the Robin Hood legend, sure, but who the heck doesn't? Robin was bland but suitably heroic, Don Malarkey (!) of Band of Brothers was playing Will Scarlett, the priest-dude from The Exorcist was playing a cool old guy, and Cate Blanchett was playing a frickin' awesome Maid Marion. Even when she was given cliched, flirty, or bitchy lines she read them with enough playfulness or venom to make them interesting. There was even a cool little political intrigue subplot tying everything together...

Then, like a tumor, the political intrigue plotline metastasized into full-blown plot cancer and crushed the organs of more interesting story elements beneath its weight. To continue with this labored analogy, one of these organs was Robin's relationship with his Merry Men, who were quickly relegated to background comic relief and were rarely spoken to by Robin after the main plot got rolling. Never mind that a few well-written conversations between the four of them could have salvaged Robin's motivations from the depths of obscurity and angst.

Another organ: the entire sideplot about the orphan thieves in Sherwood Forest. There must be a lot of footage of these kids on the cutting room floor, because they were obviously supposed to be a bigger deal than they turned out to be. A little more time spent on them, and the ending might have made an iota of sense. Also, they were the only ones doing what I had payed the see Robin do: frickin' steal things!

Another organ: the frickin' stealing! There are plenty of movies about war heroes. I go to see Robin Hood because I want a movie about a thief. But even though "robbing from the rich and giving to the poor" is kind of a key part of Robin's traditional characterization, in this movie he does so exactly once. And it's not so much "robbing from the rich and giving to the poor" as it is "robbing from the Catholic church and giving to the woman he wants to bone."

But there was a ray of light. Marion was consistently and increasingly awesome. Things were crappy for her, but she soldiered on. She had gone from being a wealthy Lady to being almost destitute, and there she was taking care of business, plowing the fields, working in the stables, reassuring her servants that she would find a way to keep them all fed, and reacting with a suitable level of "what the fuck?" when her father-in-law fake-marries her to some random dude that just showed up out of nowhere. And when the bad guys show up, demanding taxes based on how much land people own and killing anyone who can't pay, she stands up in front of the collector knowing full well that she doesn't have a penny to her name and says, "I'm Marion Locksley and I own five thousand acres, BITCH!" Okay, she doesn't call him a bitch. But she does stab her attempted rapist to death (why must there always be an attempted rapist?), grabs a sword, and saves everyone in the village from getting burned to death.

And then, at the final battle, it was all undone in one of the most pants-crappingly, eye-gougingly stupid examples of asshattery I've ever seen. To whoever thought it was a good idea, I only have this to say: in The Lord of the Rings, Eowyn didn't get to be awesome because she rode into battle with the men; she got to be awesome because she slew the Witch-King of Angmar. If she had gotten half-drowned by the Witch-King, and then Aragorn had showed up to save her and carry her off the field of battle like a child, she would have been decidedly less awesome.

And here's the sad part: in the final few minutes, when the ending music was starting to play, I glimpsed the movie that I had come to see. There was the Sheriff of Nottingham (who did nothing in the whole movie except get rebuffed by Marion once) declaring Robin of the Hood an outlaw! There was Robin with his short-changed-for-screen-time Merry Men tripping through Sherwood Forest! There were his allies hidden stealthily in the trees wielding longbows! There was Marion living in the forest with him and being a Merry Woman, and how cool would that have been? And then the movie ends.

GOD DAMMIT.

You were so close, movie, so close. But no biscuit for you.