Robin Hood (Red)

(If you're wondering about the (Red) business, click here).

The title is Robin Hood. But besides the title and the character names that’s all that makes it a Robin Hood story.

Seriously.

Ask any child what the story of Robin Hood is and they will tell you it’s about robbing from the rich and giving to the pour. Guess what the plot of this movie is. Stopping the French from invading England.

Seriously.

How horrible is that for a Robin Hood movie?

But even if you try to ignore that fact that this Robin Hood movie has nothing to do with Robin Hood, if you try to just enjoy as a fun medieval war flick, you will still be disappointed.

There is no beginning. By beginning I mean inciting incident. The movie just kind of starts. The English army is laying siege to some French castle for some reason (it has something to do with the crusades, I think but whatever the reason it doesn’t matter). That’s when we are introduced to Robin and his merry men.

The movie drags along. I kept waiting for something to happen. When I looked at my clock an hour had passed and nothing had happened yet. Robin was just walking around running into characters we recognize from the other better Robin Hood stories. They would talk about boring things and I would keep waiting for him to start robbing rich people. He did it once. And it wasn’t that cool.

In between Robin talking to the people from Nottingham there were a bunch of scenes about the French invading England. It was just characters whose names I don’t remember talking about things I didn’t care about. Mostly because at that point in the movie I didn’t think that the invasion was going to be the whole point of the movie.

This is one of the longest movies I have ever watched. Long and boring.

Even the climactic battle at the end of the movie is lame (why on earth is Robin leading the charge?). It’s like an old school version of Saving Private Ryan. Except lamer. There is never any doubt about who is going to win the battle.

“But Tyler, it’s an origin story. It’s about how Robin Hood became an outlaw. That’s why there is no Robin Hood things in the story.”

No one was asking for another Robin Hood movie. What’s worse then another Robin Hood movie? A Robin Hood origins movie.

Robin Hood is not a complicated character or a complicated story. It doesn’t need an origin story. We don’t need to know how he became an outlaw or his motivation for stealing things from rich people. At the very most that would be subtext for an actual Robin Hood movie.

What we have here is overkill. It’s two hours of something no one asked for and what no one wants to watch.

Horrible. Don’t watch it.

By the end I wished I had just watch that sweet cartoon version by Disney where he’s a fox. That was a thousand times batter then this one.