Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves

Remembering the great romantic action heroes, one instantly locked on their images: Errol Flynn, oddly gaunt and fit, his eyes filled with splendid trouble. Sean Connery as James Bond, his dark black hair balance by bushy eyebrows, leathery tan, white tux. Owen Gleiberman said in his review, “As vital as appearance was to these peerless superstars, though, it was how they sounded that crystallized their personalities. Flynn’s swashbuckling heroes almost seemed to be singing their dialogue. And Connery summoned up all of 007’s egocentric virility through the darting, sensual way he dug into the words “Bond James Bond” (a line none of his successors has ever quite mastered). Where would these actors be without their voices, without the inner, expressive counterpart to their feats of derring-do?” They’d be with Kevin Costner in “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves,” released in 1991, stuck in the role of an amazing hero – and, as Gleiberman said, “sounding like he just woke up to answer the phone.”

As Robin of Locksley, Costner says his lines in a relaxed, earnest inactivity. The problem isn’t his American accent, which occasionally comes off as acting-class British. It looks like he is thoughtful, distantly depressed. (Smiling looks like a huge help for him.) When Robin says that he’s just not going to join the outlaws of Sherwood Forest, he’s going to lead them; we don’t get his passion, his enthusiastic desire to hold control. Gleiberman said, “Costner sounds like he’s just decided to run for city council.”

As a work of avoidance, this long, action-filled, 2-hour-and-21-minute “Robin Hood” does its job. You get sucked into the story, production values, and some choice supporting actors. Gleiberman said, “Yet it’s a rouser without a rousing hero.” Costner doesn’t make himself bad – he has the star presence the role asks for. What he’s not is an emotional Robin Hood. Gleiberman said, “And without the sense that Robin is on a humanistic mission (one that’s a pleasure to fulfill), the story has no charge. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves often feels like it was made by committee. The woodland images are robust and organic, yet the shots aren’t edited together to form a consistent point of view.” You have to keep getting your attitudes, and when you look to Costner, what you see – fantastically – is a haze.

Gleiberman said, “The classic Errol Flynn version, made in 1938, isn’t a great movie, yet there’s magic — an ethereal jubilance and ease — in Flynn’s performance. He convinces you he’s having the party of his life out there in the greenwood.” At first, the makers of “Prince of Thieves” look to be making the story dark. Robin, having going through years of prison and torture during the Crusades, escapes his defeaters in Jerusalem and returns to the mountains of England. Joined by his trusted friend Azeem, played by Morgan Freeman, a religious Muslim Moor with a triangle of religious symbols tattooed on each cheek, he finds out that his loving home is under the rule of fear. Among other crimes, the fascist Sherriff of Nottingham, played by the late Alan Rickman, has murdered Robin’s nobleman father. Robin promises, “I will not rest until my father is avenged.” Then he cuts his hand open to show that he means it.

Gleiberman notes, “For a while, the movie looks like it’s going to follow in the mold of 1989’s Batman — adding a bedeviled element to the crime-fighting romanticism, turning the hero into a man who battles evil in the name of vengeance. Yet all this gets dropped pretty quickly.” Robin’s father is barely mentioned again, and the movie becomes the familiar story of Robin and his joking peasant comrades struggling to bring down the evil sheriff. There are some intense action scenes. Gleiberman said, “The director, Kevin Reynolds, gives them a contemporary brutality and zap, especially when the men unsheath their clanking broadswords, which are so heavy they hardly need to be sharp to kill you. But for all the rousing sequences of Robin and his men shooting off flaming arrows and combatting the sheriff’s forces, there aren’t enough occasions when they triumph through their wits. Robin Hood, after all, is meant to be a trickster, a rogue. But we don’t see enough of his charming guile. What’s more, except for a couple of whiz-bang camera effects devoted to the spectacle of arrows in flight, we’re barely invited to take pleasure in his prowess as an archer.”

Gleiberman continues, “The live-wire excitement that is missing from Costner’s performance is there in Alan Rickman as the twisted sheriff. Rickman, who was the terrorist in Die Hard, has a gift for playing villains who are made physically itchy by their thwarted ambitions. He’s got great Silly Putty features: His mouth, crammed with bad English teeth, contorts into pretzels of disgust and rage — yet above it, his big schnoz and pleading eyes recall Ringo Starr’s soft-edged melancholy. (He’s a psycho who’s crying on the inside.) Sporting a jet-black, ’60s-heavy-metal do, his Sheriff of Nottingham is like a skinny rat who can’t stop gnawing. There’s a comic impatience to this gimlet-eyed dictator, who wenches to relieve his anxiety. Rickman, coating every line in sarcastic venom, makes the character a perverse, modern fiend, yet he’s also in the tradition of British-ham megalomaniacs who, going back to Shakespeare’s Richard III, express their love of evil through words.”

People probably say that Costner is dominated by Rickman. However, the truth is that he’s dominated by just about every actor who has been in a scene with him. Christian Slater (who looks like he’s Jack Nicholson’s son) as the noisy, fight-loving Will Scarlett, Nick Brimble as funny Little John, Freeman as the stoic Azeem, who looks at “civilized” England with, as Gleiberman says, “a quizzically cocked eyebrow — each of these actors has a spark, and you end up wanting to see more of them.” It’s only their boss who doesn’t deserve to be called merry.

Yes, I did mention Connery at the beginning, but that’s because he makes a cameo near the end of the movie. Other than that, this is a good movie that everyone should see. If you liked Walt Disney’s “Robin Hood” and want a more serious, but likable, version of the famous character, than this one is for you. Give it a watch because you will love it. Morgan Freeman definitely played a great Muslim character, one of the best I have ever seen in movie history.

Stay tuned next week when he continue “Kevin Costner Month” with one of the biggest box office bombs in movie history.