166. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves

Song - (Everything I Do) I Do it For You (Bryan Adams)

Movie: Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (Kevin Reynolds, 1991)

I like Kevin Costner, but the world would have been a better place if he realised that Bull Durham is his greatest film. Unfortunately, the man cares too much about being perceived as noble and wholesome, which has led to some films and roles that are far less interesting than they could have been. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves is one of the worst offenders with Costner never disappearing from his "oh how anguished I am for having to make such great sacrifices" mode. At the end of the film, there is a cameo by Sean Connery as King Richard, providing more joy and wit in a couple of seconds than Costner does through the entire film. He also doesn't have much chemistry with either Morgan Freeman, Christian Slater or Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (who does give the most confident and realistic performance in the film).

Unfortunately, even aside from Costner, the other actors have problems of their own. Slater never looks convincing as someone who supposedly lives in the 12th century, and the film gives up pretending at the end with an explicitly anachronistic one-liner. This is not some sort of egregious mistake and was obviously at least partly intended as a sort of clever self-referential joke. Unfortunately, it comes at the worst moment, taking you right out of the film's most exciting moments, the only sequence that takes the time to set up the action, inviting you to think along with the characters and to follow and understand their battle plan. 

I also don't much care for Rickman's Sheriff of Nottingham, who too often feels like a retread of Die Hard's Hans Gruber. Rickman seems completely lost in his own world, you never get the feeling that he ever even thought about aligning himself with the tone of the film or with the other actors. Now, as someone who is a bit predisposed against joyless gloomy epics like this, I do somewhat respect Rickman's belligerent attitude towards it, and anytime you get the chance to make lazy screenwriters explain why you'd kill someone with a spoon, you have to take it. 

Finally, the film doesn't really know what to do with Morgan Freeman, but it deserves credit using him to portray the sophistication of the Arabs the crusaders fought against. The film introduces Robin Hood as a heroic fighter in these crusades, but never engages in the kind of stereotypes against Arabs that you would usually see in these kinds of films. It even goes out of his way to present Freeman's Azeem as a rational man of science and compassion.