ROBIN HOOD: MEN IN TIGHTS
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1993 Scott Renshaw
[This was written by a friend of the poster and was forwarded to the net with his permission. Caution: minor spoilers.]
Starring Cary Elwes, Roger Rees, Richard Lewis and Amy Yasbeck. Directed by Mel Brooks. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
I have a housemate who works for a theater concessions company, and periodically he can get us in free at the theaters where his company does business. "Robin Hood: Men in Tights" was showing at one of these theaters. I shelled out nothing more than an hour and forty minutes of my life.
I want it back.
ROBIN HOOD: MEN IN TIGHTS is co-writer/director Mel Brooks' stab at the swashbuckler genre, most specifically the 1991 Kevin Costner vehicle ROBIN HOOD, PRINCE OF THIEVES. Cary Elwes is Robin of Loxley, who returns from the Crusades to find England in the grip of the usurper Prince John (Richard Lewis) and his muscle the Sheriff of Rottingham (Roger Rees). The story, of Robin's attempts to free the kingdom and to win Maid Marian, is a thin frame on which to hang a collection of sight gags and groaners, almost none of which work.
MEN IN TIGHTS ranks among the most excruciating movie-going experiences I've ever had, and it's a damned shame. Once upon a time, Mel Brooks was funny. There is evidence. He was a writer for "Your Show of Shows," co-created "Get Smart" and created such classic film parodies as YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN and BLAZING SADDLES. But for the past fifteen years, his screen efforts have ranged from the dreadfully uneven HISTORY OF THE WORLD, PART I to the breathtakingly dumb SPACEBALLS to the pointless LIFE STINKS. I honestly didn't think it could get any worse.
Unfortunately, it got much worse. MEN IN TIGHTS is a failure on so many different levels, it's difficult to know where to begin. The acting is at times unwatchably bad, with Richard Lewis the primary culprit, guilty of first degree mugging. There was an editor in the credits, so I assume there was one, although the positively leaden pacing provides no evidence that he did anything but pick up a check. And then there is the script, a cavalcade of miserable puns that goes on...
"A mime is a terrible thing to waste." ...and on... "Hey, Blinken." "Did you say Abe Lincoln?" ...and on... "This is my friend Ahchoo." "A Jew? Here?"
...and on, and on, and on. Then there is the requisite Brooksian bodily function humor, and the gay jokes, and the breast jokes. Then there are moments when you know there was supposed to be some kind of joke somewhere, but for the life of you, you can't figure out what it was. This is a film so jaw-droppingly unfunny that the few positive reviews I've seen seem absolutely incomprehensible to me.
What's even more of a shame is that Cary Elwes' Robin Hood is actually quite charming. He generates such enormous good will, striking arms akimbo poses at every opportunity and doing his level best to underplay his part, that I kept holding out hope that it might get better. Even more depressing is the cameo appearance by Patrick Stewart as King Richard, a la Sean Connery in PRINCE OF THIEVES. Whatever it was that they paid him, it couldn't possibly have been enough.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 arrows: 1 arrow, right through the heart of whoever green-lighted this piece of garbage.
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