ROBIN HOOD, PRINCE OF THIEVES
A film review by Rick Innis
Copyright 1991 Rick Innis
I realise this has been extensively reviewed in the past, but as it's just opened in Britain I thought I'd offer my 2d (old pence) worth.
Summary: Robin of Locksley returns from the Crusades, accompanied by a Moorish warrior whose life he saved and who has sworn to repay this debt of honour, to find his father has been slain and his lands appropriated by the Sheriff of Nottingham. Evading pursuit by the Sheriff's men takes Locksley into the supposedly haunted Sherwood Forest, where he is accosted by a band of robbers which he then proceeds to take over, turning them into a force through which he plans to take his revenge of the Sheriff.
This film has a lot going for it -- action, adventure and really wild things by the score. The script is well written, the plot has some nice twists and turns in it and the supporting characters are well drawn -- Marian is fiercely independent and contemptuous of the men's crusading ambitions, the Sheriff oscillates between being a comic buffoon and a dangerous madman, and the outlaws are a cheerfully earthy bunch of Englishmen (with one exception, see below.)
Unfortunately, to my perceptions, this film has one major flaw -- the star. In a film in which all bar two of the other characters have English accents and use British English idioms (and one of them is a Moor, so that's all right), Costner's American accent and mannerisms jar dreadfully. Costner is too clean-cut, decent and wholesomely all-American to be convincing, and this destroyed a lot of the film for me. A decent voice coach would have gone a long way towards sorting this out. Unfortunately Christian Slater as Will Scarlet (in a role severely underplayed, I thought) suffered the same problem. If everyone else in the film had had American accents it probably wouldn't have been so noticeable (c.f., DANGEROUS LIAISONS and AMADEUS), but the mixture just doesn't work. I left with the feeling that was originally a British production which had been hijacked by an American production company with its eye on the box office and nothing else.
Verdict: if you sink a few beers first and watch it on video it's probably bearable, but I think I'll stick with the HTV series with Michael Praed, made during the early 80's and also now out on video.
-- JANET: rick@uk.ac.ed.cstr | Rick Innis, CSTR, Internet: rick@cstr.ed.ac.uk | University of Edinburgh, UUCP: ..mcsun!ukc!cstr!rick | Edinburgh, Scotland EH1 1HN.
.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews