Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves

 

Robin Hood: Prince In Tights Of Thieves

Dir. Kevin Reynolds

Written by Pen Densham, John Watson

Starring Kevin Coster, Morgan Freeman, Mary Elizabeth Mastantonio, Alan Rickman

 

ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THEIVES (or, RH:PoT, as the hip online kids of today call it) begins in a Jerusalem torture chamber. The first faces we see close-up are the filthy, sadistic (but helpfully English-speaking!) visages of the dungeon's torture/amputation division, as they ply their trade on the miserable Christian captives of the failed Third Crusades. In fact, even after we get a look at the hapless Englishmen, we may not realize that one of the men we are looking at is our protagonist, because he's dressed in soiled rags and sports a beard and mane that would make ZZ Top jealous. These are most assuredly not merry men. Short of starting with the slug line "The Dawn of Man," there isn't much more a film could do to convey to us in no uncertain terms that this aint yo' pappy's ROBIN HOOD. Unless you were born after 1991, in which case, it actually IS your pappy's ROBIN HOOD, canonized with a Mel Brooks parody, no less. 

In fact, I got the idea to watch this one when I reviewed ROBIN HOOD, MEN IN TIGHTS and dismissively suggested it might be funnier if you were familiar with PRINCE OF THIEVES, which I described as "a movie that no one on Earth has watched in nearly a half a century." Well, as you can imagine, it didn't even take a full minute after typing that sentence before I was overwhelmed with desire to remedy that situation. Which was an unexpected sensation for me, given that I had never previously regretted passing on this movie when it first came out and everyone agreed it was a drag. Indeed, the movie was roundly criticized at the time for being too dark and serious. Ebert called it "murky, unfocused, violent and depressing," and went on to describe it as "gloomy" and Costner as "tortured." Vincent Canby called it "joyless" and slammed it for, um, "coming out firmly for civil rights, feminism, religious freedom, and economic opportunity for all" (apparently SJWs have been ruining all culture with their divisive politics since 1991 at least).

It was, in fact, arguably the origin --patient zero-- of the trend towards dark and gritty reboots which would become basically a full-blown cultural movement by the turn of the millennium. There were earlier cinematic* stirrings of this trend; John Boorman’s trippy, violent EXCALIBUR (1981) might be an example, and Tim Burton’s BATMAN from two years earlier comes even closer (especially in terms of how it was perceived at the time), but RH:PoT is much more beholden to some kind of faux-realistic affectation than either of those movies even pretended to be. People considered those films (and the following year’s BATMAN RETURNS), to be dark, but they’re certainly not “gritty,” which turns out to be a vital –although perhaps not quite as foundational as it might appear-- element of what would become the formula. “Gritty and realistic” remakes were not, of course, wholly unknown in 1991; Outlawvern commenter Pacman 2.0 noted the 1984 ‘this ain’t your daddy’s Tarzan’ adventure/drama GREYSTOKE, which definitely feels like it shares at least some DNA with PRINCE OF THEIVES in its self-conscious foregrounding of “gritty realism” within a pulpy premise. But it differs in that it represents an effort to return to the original (somewhat darker and more intellectual**) source material. PRINCE OF THEIVES has no definitive source material (the conception of “Robin Hood” and the related characters evolved slowly over centuries of poems, ballads and plays, all of which clearly arise from older folk traditions which predate the 15^th-century records which survive today), and so can’t claim fidelity to authoritative origins. Or to any kind of established history, for that matter, which perhaps explains why it feints towards “realism” only in a few highly selective ways, more as a signifier that it ought to be taken seriously than as an honest attempt to grapple with this subject in any kind of real world context (there’s a magical witch and a Bryan Adams song, among other distinctly fantastical elements).

The “realism,” then, is mostly a facade, though it would prove to be of defining aesthetic significance in the films that later adopted the same technique. Fundamentally, though, PRINCE OF THEIVES, like EXCALIBUR, Burton’s BATMAN films or the later Nolan/Snyder superhero films, is banking not on authenticity, but on surprise: its ability to shock a complacent audience by intentionally undermining expectations about a universally known icon which has grown so familiar as to feel “safe.” It is, like many of the “dark and gritty” reboots that would follow it, a movie that is deliberately confrontational towards an audiences’ presumed expectations about the subject matter. The entire raison d’etre is to say “hey kids, this isn’t the old, boring Robin Hood your parents like! This is the real Robin Hood, brash, uncompromised, uncowed, the one your square history teachers don’t want you to know about! He shares your dangerous, rebellious disaffection, scares your parents, and just might be too hot for polite society to handle!” (it’s worth noting that the production company, Morgan Creek, had previously enjoyed some in-retrospect-utterly-inexplicable success with its similarly irreverent semi-revisionist Western YOUNG GUNS).

It is this pugnacious attitude, based on shaking the comforting perceptions of nostalgic figures (many associated with childhood) that I think critics were responding to back then; it’s not that these films are necessarily “dark” compared to, say, other 1991 alumni like PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS or SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (or even TERMINATOR 2: JUDGEMENT DAY, which is indisputably more violent and intense). It’s that the film’s entire modus operandi has to do with subverting our expectations about deep-rooted cultural icons which have persevered so long as to feel centering and stable and perhaps somehow “pure,” untouched by the messy world of adulthood –but also static, abstract and unthreatening. Challenging that can be uncomfortable in some ways, which is, I think, what makes it potentially productive in others: I don’t know how culturally valuable it is to perpetually reimagine the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles so they stay fresh and vibrant for future generations, but one can at least dimly imagine some value in taking the tale of Robin Hood –with its fundamental fury at wealth inequality and wholehearted endorsement of revolutionary resistance—and shaking off the cobwebs a little, rescuing the tale from being a harmless fairy story rendered toothless by rote repetition and restoring its subversive bite. And locating it within a cinematic “reality” featuring distinctive signifiers that point to contemporary relevance –such as the “dark and gritty” aesthetic which, at least in 1991, was a cue to interpret the material as serious and hard-hitting, as opposed to the idealized, theatrical affectations most of the kids in 1991 would have associated with the corny old Robin Hood movies of the past—feels like a legitimate strategy to that end. But it is, ultimately, a strategy, not an end in itself. So while the critics –including myself!—often find it convenient to describe this and similar films as “dark and gritty,” they are really doing something rather different just underneath the surface. It’s just that to do so, something like ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THEIVES combines both the calculated “darkening” of material popularly perceived as frothy matinee stuff for kiddies (like we see in EXCALIBUR and the BATMANs) with the “realistic” “grittiness” of GREYSTOKE (or the next year’s revisionist UNFORGIVEN) to add some visceral weight and punch to a basic premise which had perhaps been dulled and diluted through rote repetition.

This would, of course, prove hugely influential as a technique, in many ways becoming a defining feature of the way studios thought about revitalizing old properties in the subsequent years (though the effect was not immediate – by 1995’s BATMAN FOREVER, the studio was deliberately trying to lighten things up, and it wasn’t until the ignominious failure of the glibly comic BATMAN & ROBIN in 1997 that the tide really started to turn. And even then, you had the cartoonish GODZILLA remake in 1998 and the old-fashioned corniness of THE MUMMY reboot in 1999). It obviously it struck some kind of chord at the time, though; the movie was a huge hit. But in1991, it sounded like a bunch of pretentious self-serious garbage to me, and I never bothered with it.

Imagine my surprise, then, to finally watch the movie and discover thirty years later that it is in fact a completely different kind of garbage! All that fretting about the gloomy, intellectual new Robin Hood was bunk, probably a response to the studio PR machine more than the movie itself. Far from being a broody, intellectual bore, RH:PoT turns out, in fact, to be a movie which is almost maniacal in its desire to entertain. You can almost hear the producers screaming "There should be witty banter in EVERY scene! And constant swashbuckling action! And raw sex appeal! And sweeping, expensive spectacle! But also relatable aw-shucks human drama! And for God's sake, can we get some sweeping, triumphant music in here?" Apparently this is what "dark and gritty" was like in 1991. It was a time of innocence.

But just because it’s not actually dark and gritty at all doesn’t mean it’s not a labored mess, it’s just a labored mess in a different way. A better way, I should stipulate; its earnest effort to create constantly entertaining big-screen spectacle is appreciated in this age of lazy, jokey 200-million dollar superhero sitcoms. Whatever it is, RH:PoT is absolutely never lazy. It was a fairly expensive production for its time,*** and man, every penny of that budget ended up on the screen. The movie is jam-packed with incident, setpieces characters, elaborate sets and costumes. Unfortunately therein lies the problem; it's so damned fanatical about constantly ingratiating itself in the moment that it loses track of the big picture. It's a movie where fun stuff is constantly happening (fight scenes, evil monologues, Kevin Coster swimming in the buff, bonding, fighting, comedy, pathos) but the story never seems to build any momentum.

Or, perhaps, it spends far too much time trying to build momentum. Like many of its “dark and gritty” descendants (striking so, in fact, another way in which the movie proves shockingly prescient, even prophetic, about the shape of Hollywood franchises to come), it is cripplingly obsessed with the hero’s origins (a disastrous trend for narrative film, which would be kicked into overdrive with the STARS WARS prequel trilogy in 1999, but—crucially-- is all-but-absent from BATMAN). Hence, the torture-chamber opening; where previous Robin Hood films simply presented the familiar character fully-formed, PRINCE OF THEIVES wants to meticulously chart the course of how the character came by all his iconic trappings, from the bow to the Merry Men to the name. This takes quite a bit of time and exposition to accomplish, and even if much of it is solidly entertaining it seriously challenges the point of making a movie about Robin Hood, if for much of the runtime our hero is not yet recognizable as that character. “Robin of Locksley” doesn't become "Robin Hood" proper until well past the halfway point, and “Becoming Robin Hood” and “Doing Robin Hood Stuff” are two different story arcs which feel noticeably separate, related but not comfortably contiguous. The movie is burdened with so much backstory that once the pieces are finally in place, everything feels weirdly rushed, with the whole Hood-Nottingham conflict crammed into two huge setpieces in the movie’s back half and never given the chance to breath. When the big climax turns up (nearly 2 hours into a merciless 143 minutes**** -- apparently egregiously bloated runtimes for blockbusters are not wholly an artifact of 21st-century Hollywood) it still feels narratively too soon, like they already did a whole movie and then tried to cram its sequel into 50 minutes at the end. 

Still, credit where it's due: fun stuff is constantly happening. Even aside from the impressive action and production, it’s a hugely entertaining cast. Alan Rickman, as the villainous Sheriff of Nottingham (no Prince John here, which probably saves us a good 40 extra minutes of screentime, though at something of a cost to the story's central conflict), goes absolutely all-out mega-acting, to richly entertaining effect, and most of the rest of the cast is able to meet him at least halfway, leaning into the larger-than-life broadness of their characters. Costner makes for a notable exception; his decision to play the title character as a humble, intellectual man of action was the subject of bitter criticism when the movie premiered (with many critics comparing him unfavorably to Errol Flynn's breezy, swashbuckling take, which they apparently considered definitive). But today it seems like the obvious right choice, leaning into the actor's folksy everyman charm and allowing him to operate as the solid hub of a rather unwieldly and eccentric wheel. It's a little silly that he doesn't even take a swing at a British accent, (even Christian Slater at least tries. Or at least, I think that's what he's doing) but hell, it's a silly movie. Robin seems to become a hero because he has a nearly inhuman ability to find things to swing from in virtually any situation, like a 12th-century Spider-Man. If you can enjoy that, I don't think we really need to worry too much about the accent.

And I hope you do enjoy that, because swinging on things is very much the movie's idea of excitement. Which makes it kind of amazing that this friendly, silly, eager-to-please mainstream blockbuster was taken so seriously at the time. Despite its foundational role in the creation of the gritty, serious, realistic reboot… when you come down to it, it's hardly any of those things at all! There's, like, three nut-shots in the first half-hour. Costner and Freeman banter like Riggs and Murtaugh! Friar Tuck breaks the fourth wall! There's an out-of-the-blue cameo in the last 30 seconds! There's a huge fiery explosion that Coster has to strut away from without looking back, for Christ's sake! And I mean, it's cool enough when guys do that in modern movies where shit is exploding all the time; when the fuck is this dude in the 12th century ever gonna see anything that cool again? So double badass, there. 

Basically, I think the movie is a bit misunderstood. It's not so much an attempt to make things more realistic as it is an attempt to add a different texture to a familiar story, teasing a few new threads of meaning out of it, but mostly just having fun doodling in the margins with whatever the filmmakers thought might be cool. 

Obviously I'm in favor of that, and would like to correct the record on 1991's behalf. But if the movie is misunderstood or misremembered, I also can't necessarily say it's underrated. Like anyone trying too hard, it's not all that consistent, and a little exhausting to put up with. But it’s interesting that this fact is not what history has held against it – for better or worse, the movie, if it is remembered at all, is remembered for its pioneering, boundary-pushing “dark and gritty” approach. The fact that it self-evidently isn't either didn't matter, apparently; that was what people remembered about it anyway. Of Ebert’s complaints that the movie is "murky, unfocused, violent and depressing," the only one which is even a little true is “unfocused.” But in the movie world, perception is reality, and obviously even the timid gestures the movie makes in that direction felt significant enough to the contemporary audience to be hugely impactful – not just on the way they viewed the film, but as a potential lens to view any proposed remake or reboot. It is, I think, no coincidence at all that in 2010, we got another Robin Hood movie (this one directed by Ridley Scott and starring Russel Crowe) which leaned even harder in the direction of a “dark and gritty” origin story. After all, by that point, RH:PoT very much was your pappy’s Robin Hood – and the problem with its basic strategy is that it is by definition it loses its zest as it ceases to be surprising. And of course, you can only get so dark and gritty before the whole approach loses its impact. The next ROBIN HOOD, in 2018, took a wholly different approach, trying to mimic a very different set of aesthetic signifiers: those of the modern comic book blockbuster. All of which leaves poor PRINCE OF THEIVES as an orphaned relic of a bygone era, which blazed bright for a brief moment, and perhaps had a significant influence on the direction pop culture took in the subsequent years, but has as an independent work of art sunk into relative obscurity, even suffering the indignity of being eclipsed in the popular consciousness by its own parody, which is today almost certainly more frequently watched and better remembered.

But at least I respect its hustle. If more movies had tried to imitate that, rather than its alleged gritty realness, blockbuster history might have been shaped for the better. But oh well, at least we'll always have the merchandise. 

And, I'm sorry to remind you, a truly dire Bryan Adams song. 

 

 

* Comic books had been going in this direction for some time, since at least Frank Miller’s 1986 sweaty, fascistic grimdark The Dark Knight Returns. By the 1990’s, gritty anti-heroes like Venom and Spawn would be the rule, rather than the exception. But movies were slower to follow, flirting with the florid nihilism of comic books throughout the 90s but struggling with how –or if—to translate that energy to the big screen.

** Or so I’m told. It’s Edgar Rice Burroughs, so I feel like there’s probably a limit on how “dark and intellectual” it could be, but the consensus seems to be that GREYSTOKE is, in both tone and substance, much more faithful to the source material than previous adaptations had been. I’ll have to take their word for it since there’s no way in hell I’m reading 1912’s Tarzan of the Apes. Right? I mean, of all the things in the world to read, why would I read that? I mean, I guess, it probably would be interesting as a cultural artifact. And it’s probably pretty short. Oh shit, should I read 1912’s Tarzan of the Apes? It does sound like the kind of thing I would do, now that I see it in written out in black and white.

*** Though at $48 million, hardly record-breaking; 1989’s BATMAN had cost only a little less, and TERMINTATOR 2 cost twice as much. Only a scant four years later, Costner’s own WATERWORLD would cost $172 million.

**** And there’s also a 155-minute “extended edition,” which apparently contains even more exposition about whatever supernatural conspiracy the Sheriff of Nottingham is on about.