Robin Hood (2018) ***

Source: Imdb

(The one with Taron Egerton) This new re-telling of the age-old story had its good and bad points. The cast did their best to hold the script together, but I was not entirely convinced by Taron Egerton’s performance and I really disliked Marion. The Sheriff of Nottingham was not evil enough – yet another one where they try to explain away a bit of his twisted soul with childhood trauma – and actually made some good points throughout the film, which made it hard to truly root against him. The only guy I really enjoyed watching was Jamie Dornan. His character was a bit misguided, but well-intentioned – which is why the end made no sense AT ALL. What a shabby set-up for a sequel.

The script was barely ok, but terribly superficial, with half-assed dialogue and pseudo-philosophy. Visually, the entire thing never really came together. I acknowledge that they didn’t ever intend to present a period piece costume film, but the look was just distractingly inconsistent to the point where it looked just plane lazy. I was wondering about everybody’s perfectly tailored, clean office clothing complete with pin-striped suits and shirts, and tight T-shirts everywhere. And those leather coats! And then they had hauberks and crusader’s outfits. The look of Nottingham also seemed so obviously cobbled together from steampunk fantasy, horrible CGI of a pseudo-English country town and clearly distinguishable, extensive shots of somewhere in Croatia/Mediterranean. Everything was just too inconsistent.
And then there were those annoying details, like constantly pulling arrows from wounds. These people are supposed to be seasoned warriors. Why would they do such things? At least they did ok on the archery, though it did not feature nearly as much as I would have liked. I’m an Olympic-style target archer myself (thought I shoot barebow. Sights are just cheating :D) and a lot of what they did looked fairly credible, though you could see that Taron was trained up under time pressure. The extras were given very light-weight prop bows and that showed in the handling of them, but they did a decent job. The fight choreographies could have been much better, though. And the potential for humour was not nearly exhausted. I expected there to be a lot of cheeky wit and one-liners, but no.
Anyway, due to the lacklustre script with plenty of missed opportunities, the utterly inconsistent look and lack of humour, this is only a watcheable 3/5. It seemed a pretty indulgent piece of work.

Robin Hood on Imdb