“…just a minute. Robin Hood steals money from my pocket, forcing me to hurt the public, and they love him for it?! THAT'S IT, THEN!! Cancel the kitchen scraps for lepers and orphans, no more merciful beheadings, and call off Christmas!”
There are some movies that take over one summer, and just sort of don’t get mentioned again bar a comparison to later times. This is…sort of one of them. Back in 1991, it was certainly a bit deal, with that one Bryan Adams song being absolutely everywhere, and still cropping up on radio every once in a while. Even so, there’s still enough who look back on it with some affection, warts and other medieval skin conditions and all—it’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.
It was the first major production of the old legend since the rather somber 1970s Robin and Marian (also by coincidence with Sean Connery in it, as we’ll get to)—making this one a kind of reconstruction. The other prior most well-known iteration was probably the animated Disney one, which, er, probably isn’t the most direct comparison. Anyhoo, there were still other attempts, including a 1980s BBC series from which this outing probably took a couple of concepts like Robin returning with a Muslim ally from the Holy Land—but that one also went into weird pagan revival territory. Either way, for the time, this one was on the surface a sincere enough attempt to tell an old tale but for the 90s, with a lot of what that entailed (like a far less rosy look at the Crusades than what might’ve come before).
The casting is—for the most part, and we’ll get to that—pretty darn solid. We have of course the scenery-annihilating presence of Brian Blessed for what’s far too short a screen time, and we also have the awesome co-starring of Morgan Freeman as Azeem. Despite seemingly being ‘a black sidekick’, his character is actually pretty well-written for the period, being a relative figure of sanity who can actually back up his costuming posturing, and gets some of the best dialogue of the leads.
And then…well, let’s not dance around it, we have Kevin Costner. Him not bothering to put on an English accent isn’t necessarily a problem—actual English accents of the time period would probably sound weird and out of place if they were actually replicated. No, he plays it very low-key and somber, despite it being a pretty over the top swashbuckling adventure at heart, like he’s a weary veteran coming home…and as we’ve seen on Untouchables, Costner is in fact capable of doing an intense professional, but that’s also not quite what fits here. He’s not quite a vortex of boredom like he would be in future titles, but he’s also not the best part here either.
Because that of course goes to Alan Rickman in what may be his second best role after Die Hard (Harry Potter, you say? Eh, third, fine). Rickman, on the other hand, knows precisely what kind of movie he’s in. And when he does an over the top villain, he goes over the top. Oh, it’s not enough he’s taxing peasants, he’s literally part of a Satanic conspiracy on top. It’s not enough he tortures people, it’s that he intends to do it with a spoon because, as he so memorably tells us, it’ll hurt more!! It’s just nearly worth it just for him!
We also have Michael McShane also going all ham as a Friar, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as our Marian for the obligatory cheesy romance scenes, forest bathing and all; and we have Christian Slater who is in fact putting on an accent, but he’s not quite sure which one, while also being the obligatory twist in the story with a random familial connection shoehorned in.
Overall, the film’s tone is slightly weird, but enjoyable—it goes for a more dingy medieval feel, even though we have fantastical forest villages and inexplicable skull-wearing barbarians in the Middle Ages. But by the end, we get full on pulp action involving catapults and duels with the villains, and while it’s not exactly expertly crafted, damned if you’re not having some fun.
That leaves us with something not a masterpiece, but definitely packing enough solid casting (for the most part) and sincere performances were it counts for it to be entertaining. For some, what does still make it stand out a bit is that it’s the last effort to do an actual film adaptation of the story—since then we’ve had weird alternate takes like that Ridley Scott outing that nobody cared about, another BBC series that seems to have been forgotten, and a bizarre 2018 one unable to decide when it’s taking place and being so on the nose with allegories that we have crusaders in the Middle East wielding bows like assault rifles. Yeah.
Either way, if you want something silly but still offering your castles, arrows, and baddies, this one still more or less gets the job done!
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