Yahoo News Taron Egerton's Robin Hood misses the mark completely
The first reviews for the latest Robin Hood film are in, and it seems Taron Egerton's arrow may have slightly missed the mark.
Robin Hood stars Egerton as Robin of Loxley who returns home from The Third Crusade after being mistakenly thought dead, to discover his hometown being impoverished by the evil Sheriff of Nottingham (Ben Mendehlson). Thus, Robin dons his now ubiquitous hood, bow and arrow, and quickly sets about restoring justice to the town and its people.
Directed by Otto Bathurst, the film clocks in at 1 hr 56 minutes long and also stars Jamie Foxx, Jamie Dornan, Eve Hewson and Tim Minchin. However, early reactions suggest that neither the film's lengthy running time nor starry cast is worth the trouble.
Here's our review round-up:
"To be fair, when you're dealing with something as culturally ingrained and cliché-ridden as Robin Hood you might as well go for something fresh, and go for broke. But for all its stylistic ambition, and its efforts to reference modern concerns (the Sheriff of Nottingham's anti-Islamic invective), Robin Hood misfires thanks to a crucial absence of internal logic. This world just doesn't work."
"The plot is twisty in a perfunctory way, the action predictably explosive, the sought-after exhilaration nonexistent."
"This bloated, featureless, CGI-heavy movie is not so much stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, as stealing from Guy Ritchie, Batman, Two-Face and a few others – and not giving back all that much to the audience."
"It's a love story devoid of romance, an action flick severely lacking in spark and spectacle, a historical epic filled with flagrant inaccuracies and wrongheaded revisionism. There is nothing particularly fresh or inventive about the film, and, setting aside the wildly incongruous accents, jarringly modern, machine-stitched costumes and ugly CG render of a vaguely medieval setting, it is a simple fact that no one has ever looked cool shooting a bow and arrow while pirouetting backwards off a ledge."
"The action here is too phony and mechanically cranked up to believe that anything is on the line. Mendelsohn's villain is boringly one-note, Eve Hewson's Marion uses an incongruous Yank accent and always looks as though she's just stepped out of the makeup trailer, F. Murray Abraham swans around in fancy cardinal's vestments looking sinister and Foxx seems pissed off that he's not somewhere, perhaps anywhere, else. As for Egerton, he's a boy doing a man's job."
Ouch.
Robin Hood opens in cinemas on November 21.
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