Robin Hood review

With a smug wink, it drags us back in time while holding on to all-too-familiar modern blockbuster sensibilities, rebranding the hero as “cool” in an attempt to keep up.

This makes him nobleman Robin of Loxley (Taron Egerton) who is drafted to fight for England in the Crusades by Order of the Sheriff of Nottingham (Ben Mendelsohn) not long after meeting Marian (Eve Hewson) who caught his eye when she tried to steal one of his horses.

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Cut to four years later and, after an expedition gone awry, Robin returns from Arabia to England only to find his ancestral home seized to help pay for the sheriff’s war effort.

He also discovers that Marian thinks he’s long dead, after he was announced as one of the war’s fallen soldiers two years prior. She’s now shacked up with Will (Jamie Dornan), a man who does what he can to help his fellow commoners as they struggle to get by while being forced to “pay their fair share”.

With the help of a new-found companion in Yahya AKA John (Jamie Foxx), an Arabian man whom he helped during the war and who has a lust for revenge after the execution of his son, Robin sets out to hit the sheriff where it hurts most – his pocket.

There’s very little worthwhile in this trudging version of the legend, including and emphatically in the all-important action set-pieces. It’s bizarre that for a film that’s so hell-bent on making as many things explode and as many arrows fly as this does, that it should be so deathly dull in the process. Rarely has there been so much stuff happening on-screen at the one time that amounts to so little. It’s just noise you wish could be turned down.

There’s no sense of peril, no compelling flow to the events as overstuffed and convoluted action comes crashing down with no real impact other than interrupting the uninteresting versions of these well-known characters relaying dialogue that if it was anymore ham-fisted it would oink.

Delivering that inept dialogue is an array of actors who are wasted. Egerton’s usual charm is muted under the weight of a lacklustre characterisation of the hero caught up in an even less involving romance.

Mendelsohn’s customarily reliable menace is rendered anything but as a distinctly one-dimensional villain, while the miscasting of both Foxx (whose odd couple camaraderie with Egerton is often cringe-worthy) and none other than Tim Minchin (as Fryer Tuck) is woefully distracting.

The rabble-rousing hero of the common people, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor aspect that fuels this particular English legend fails to convince here. It never conjures that sense of exciting myth-making necessary to spark interest in his original story heroics or as a rebooted franchise going forward.

Even less convincing is the sense of time and place – it never truly feels like an in-crisis, destined-for-rebellion England of old – whilst the costumes are so pristine in their faux period evocation that it feels like they were bought off the rack at TK Maxx.

The film actively flits between stale tedium and absurdity but without the guts to embrace the ridiculousness.Say what you will about Guy Ritchie’s questionable reboot of King Arthur, at least it was halfway self-aware.

What exactly was the point of this whole endeavour? It does nothing to answer that question. Instead it is more likely to send you away simply quivering with boredom.