Seeing as this dealt with the time Robin Longstride (I never knew that name) was attached to Richard the Lionheart's army in The Crusades, to the time he was declared an outlaw by the slippery King John, I guess it should have been called Robin Hood, The Prequel.
If you check imdb.com for "Robin Hood", you'll find well over 100 filmed versions of this basic story, so credit to the team making this 2010 version for turning out a totally absorbing, but who-knows-whether-any-of-it-actually-happened story.
Russell Crowe looked, but didn't really sound the part, wandering all over Great Britain with his accent, and just as I thought "aha, that was a Liverpool accent", I wondered if they would have had scousers in the 12th Century, and then his accent wandered a bit south-east. The fact that Nottingham isn't really in Northern England - it's more central, he needn't have struggled with Scouse or Manc, and just tried to sound natural middle England.
If you check imdb.com for "Robin Hood", you'll find well over 100 filmed versions of this basic story, so credit to the team making this 2010 version for turning out a totally absorbing, but who-knows-whether-any-of-it-actually-happened story.
Russell Crowe looked, but didn't really sound the part, wandering all over Great Britain with his accent, and just as I thought "aha, that was a Liverpool accent", I wondered if they would have had scousers in the 12th Century, and then his accent wandered a bit south-east. The fact that Nottingham isn't really in Northern England - it's more central, he needn't have struggled with Scouse or Manc, and just tried to sound natural middle England.
Anyhow, it was gritty and looked realistic enough, with excellent medieval castle / farmyard scenes.
The French fared badly in most of the battle scenes, which is always a bonus.
Interestingly, there were none of the archery histrionics (like, one arrow splitting another in some target competition, or splicing a sheet of parchment in a superhuman feat of accuracy, as we've seen way too often in earlier interpretations of the story), and it was better for that.
Great fun, if conquests of the pillaging and raping kind can be properly described as "fun".
Why it was necessary to have two Australians (Crowe and Blanchett, playing Robin and Marion), two Americans (including William Hurt) playing Lord Marshall and Will Scarlet, a Swede (Max von Sydow), two Canadians playing Little John and Alan A'Dale, a Guatemalan (seriously) playing King John in this quintissentially English story, and the only Englishman (Mark Strong) playing a traitor, beats me, but it all worked well enough. Surely there are enough real English outlaws available for work.
No comments:
Post a Comment