The Naked Gun (2025)

Serving 20 Years for Mans Laughter

or

"Usual is Unusual, Usually" 

 

I was worried about this one. The original "Naked Gun" series (the ones that starred Leslie Nielsen as Lt. Frank Drebin) came out of of the Z-A-Z team—the guys that made the original Airplane!—they would be David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams, who had a free-wheeling style of evergreen comedy and an impeccable sense of timing that made their movies work, despite production values that would have been suited for a Hallmark movie. That stuff's tough to duplicate—just ask anyone who saw the non-Z-A-Z sequel, Airplane 2, which was a desperate cash-grab and desperately unfunny despite writers credits by two of the geniuses behind "The Simpsons". 

 

"The Naked Gun" films came out of a Z-A-Z TV series that lasted all of six episodes (before being cancelled) called "Police Squad!" and I remember it as being fitfully funny and not quite up to par with the laugh-a-minute styles of Airplane! or their "Elvis-fights-the-Nazis" follow-up, Top Secret! The ideas were good, playing with the tropes of television and especially cop shows, but they were slightly hampered by 1980's TV censorship and the comedic pace never matched their movie work. That changed eight years later when they revived the concept for feature films and everything went up a few notches. Three "Naked Gun" films were produced between 1988 and 1994, the last only having David Zucker involved with the writing. The complete Z-A-Z team acted as producers. There'd been talk about doing a fourth "Naked Gun" movie with Nielsen, but nothing came of it. His death in 2010 put the stopper in it.

Now, thanks to producer Seth McFarlane's clout, there's a new one, the duplicate-titled The Naked Gun, featuring Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin, Jr., the son of Leslie Nielsen's character, and he's a chip off the old blockhead. Not the most original of concepts, but Neeson does such an amazing job of playing it absolutely straight while still nailing the comic timing that it's a pleasure to see him make the Nielsen transition from drama to high comedy with nary a misstep. The review for the movie at RogerEbert.com stated that it is "legitimately" Neeson's best screen performance, and one comes out of The Naked Gun actually believing it, so deft is his way of fusing comedy with the deadly-serious "I have skills" intensity that he brought to his "action-star" phase.

What's the plot? Who cares? Surely, you don't think the efficacy of a "Naked Gun" entry lies in the carefully crafted screenplay. No, this is a matter of throwing all kinds of shit at a fan—which became a literal joke in Airplane!—and seeing what sticks. But, loosely, it's about a tech billionaire (Danny Huston, who's sounding more and more like his Dad every movie), who's into breaking things and starting from scratch...including populations. Somehow, Junior Drebin gets involved in all this, as well as getting involved with the sister (Pamela Anderson, who's actually quite good) of an "accident" victim.

One is struck by how good the movie looks, with lots of mood-lighting and leaning into noir styles (as opposed to the Z-A-Z approach of key lighting everything, lest you miss a joke in the shadows, and also aping the style of its inspiration, "'M' Squad"). That's a bit of a shock, but seeing as this one is a couple generations removed from its source, it's a good shock.

Is it funny? Comedy is always subjective (he hedged)—one man's laugh-riot is another's snooze-fest—but, the first hour or so provided some genuine howlers and some inspired bits of business...then right about the time director Shaffer cuts to a shot of the house band of the villain's "Bengal Club" (and does nothing with it), the movie coasts to the end, wasting joke opportunities, occasionally perking up, but seemingly on comedy auto-pilot until the end. That wouldn't be so discouraging if the first two acts weren't so darned good.

Hopefully, there'll be more. It's refreshing to find a movie that's funnier and sillier than watching the nightly news. 

 

Oh. And don't call me "Shirley."

  Wilhelm Alert: @ 01:15.00

Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1

Costner's Folly, Chapter 2 ("Nobody Knows Anything")

or

Going For the Fences
 

You've got to hand it to Kevin Costner. He takes chances. He's parlayed his television success on "Yellowstone" to make a movie he's been dreaming of for a couple of decades, in times both fallow and flush, cast it with a steady stream of great character actors who've never passed onto the A-list, split it into two chapters (although hopefully there will be more) and released the first one—in which various story-lines do not intersect—as a 3-hour set-up...the sum of which would spell box-office poison to a movie-going audience that wants its product pre-digested and easily grasped like fast-food.

 

And who can blame him? He's done it before. When he was making it, Dances with Wolves was being derided as "Costner's Folly" for making a Western when they weren't fashionable, for it's extensive location shooting, for the supposed grandiosity of writing, directing, producing and starring in it, for it's planned use of sub-titles, and for its cost overruns. 

 

But, as William Goldman wrote, nobody in Hollywood knows anything. Dances with Wolves became a box-office smash, its elegaic, and unconventionally seditious, story becoming a hit with audiences and garnering the Best Picture Oscar, beating out Goodfellas (which some may argue was a mistake, but, to my mind, really wasn't).

So, here's "Coster's Folly" Chapter Two, the ungainly titled Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1, with a story by Mark Kasdan (who co-wrote Silverado, a favorite of mine), Costner and Jon Baird, photographed by J. Michael Muro, who shot Costner's lovely Open Range.

 

And it's great. Simply great.

For a 3-hour movie, it sails right by, packed to the sprockets with detail, period and story-wise, never seeming to waste a frame in telling three...four? five?...stories about a plot of land in the San Pedro Valley in the American west that may—or may not —be available for homesteading, and the people who are attracted to the promise of it (whether it is true or not) and the people already living there who take it for what it is. 

 

There are the first white settlers, there to survey and parcel, but as they're alone in the wilderness and, unbeknownst to them, surveying Apache hunting grounds, they soon fall victim to a war party. Their graves are the first semi-permanent structures of Horizon. They won't be the last.

But, the pattern will remain the same. By 1863, there is a well-established colony on the site, across the river from those three original graves. They, too, are attacked by Apache, leaving a limited number of survivors: some, like Frances Kittridge (Sienna Miller) and her daughter, Elizabeth (Georgia MacPhail) will take shelter at nearby Fort Gallant; others, like the boy who rode to the fort to get help, Russell (Etienne Kellici) form a hunting party to track down the Apache who burned down the encampment.

That attack has caused a dispute between the leader of the war party, Pionsenay (Owen Crow Shoe) and the leader Tuayeseh (Gregory Cruz), resulting in the younger man splitting from the tribe, taking one of Tuayeseh's sons with him. 

In Montana, James Sykes (Charles Halford) is shot by Lucy (Jena Malone), who takes her son David and flees for the Wyoming territory. Sykes' sons Junior (Jon Beavers) and Caleb (Jamie Campbell Bower) are sent to find her and the child. They catch up with her where she now goes by the name Ellen, married to hopeful lands-trader Walter Childs and living with a local prostitute Marybelle (Abbey Lee). When the Sykes boys show up, there is a confrontation between the vicious Caleb and saddle-tramp Hayes Ellison (Costner), a potential customer of Marybelle's. She and Hayes and the child escape town to avoid repercussions of the murder.

Also heading for Horizon is a wagon train, moving along the Santa Fe Trail, under the auspices of Matthew Van Weyden (Luke Wilson), who is having trouble keeping the eclectic group of settlers (including a naive British couple and the family of Frances Kittridge's late husband) of the mind that, although they may be headed for a paradise, they're not there yet, and water and team-spirit are in short supply in a desert.

In the mix are interesting characters, like the leaders of the Army detachment at Ft. Gallant, who are straight out of John Ford's Cavalry films: Lt. Trent Gephart (Sam Worthington, the most effective performance I've seen of his), who's a pragmatic soldier and would just as soon have settlers somewhere else and the "indigenous" (as he calls them) left to their land to keep the peace, a sentiment acknowledged but considered historically unrealistic by Gallant's leader, Col. Albert Houghton (Danny Huston) and his sergeant major, Thomas Riordan (Michael Rooker, in a slightly less garrulous version of the parts Victor McLaglan played in Ford films). One likes these people and you get the feeling everybody's doing the best they can under the conditions and the inevitability of time.

That's a novel's worth of people and a lot of stories and one suspects everybody's going to converge in Horizon (the town itself will probably end up being the focus of the series), their characters already established and with ensuing complications in the offing—Costner has previews of the next chapter at the end of this one and my appetite for it is whetted.

Despite the obvious nods towards Ford, Horizon: an American Saga, so far, feels more in the vein of the sprawling How the West was Won, but, in character, more like "Lonesome Dove", where individuals weave in and out of the fabric of the narrative, and sometimes—as in life—are never to be seen again in an indifferent Universe, lost in the stream of History. Costner may love his Westerns, but he acknowledges there's less romanticism to it when the survival rate hovers around 50%.

It was in Ford's film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, where a reporter states "This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." Ford's career peeled back veneers of western legend varnish in his films and in his later work stripped off more layers of his own earlier myth-making. Costner goes even farther, taking into account the grubbier myths of Leone and Peckinpah (and Eastwood) with his hard-scrabble porous towns in need of light and cleaning and extermination. He goes a step further by putting back all the practicalities of the settler experience that Ford cut out—the burying of the dead, the scarcity of water, the bugs and critters, the difficulty of killing a man with ball-shot, the necessity of self-sustainment by farming, the ritual of hard work, more important community matters than tea-dances and ceremonies.

If there's anything more to wish for, for me, it would be that there's more of it (despite others quibbling about length). A couple transition sequences seem to have been excised just to speed things along that might not have added much but may have smoothed a passage of time.

It's still early days, but one gets the sense that Costner will be making a point that the beauty of the West that we admire may not be just a matter of the dirt and stone carved by time and tide but also foundationed by the bones of those who walked before us. 

The Dead Don't Hurt

To the End of the World

or

"How Was Your War?" "Too Long. How Was Yours?"

 

It starts out very quietly before we see anything. The sounds of Nature. The slightest of breaths.

 

A knight rides through the woods on horse-back, a little girl waiting for him.

 

It is the last thoughts of Vivienne Le Coudy (Vicky Krieps, she of Phantom Thread), French-Canadian florist/bartender/mother/cook/carpenter/pioneer-woman. She is tended to, watched over, then mourned by her common-law husband Holger Olsen (Viggo Mortensen), Danish carpenter/soldier/sheriff.

 

Vivienne is dead. And the man Olsen wants to kill, Weston Jeffries (Solly McLeod) has just killed five people at the local saloon, as well as the deputy sheriff of the town. He's the son of a local rancher, Alfred Jeffries (Garret Dillahunt) and just no damn good. The mayor, Rudolph Schiller (Danny Huston, in a performance slightly reminiscent of his father), who has business dealings with the man can't have such a massacre go unpunished, so he informs Olsen, who is in the process of burying his wife, of what happened, and assures the sheriff that they have the man who did it. A rather dim employee of the rancher volunteers to take the rap, never realizing that he might be hanged to save the son's neck. Olsen turns in his badge in protest. He has work to do.

 

Being Sheriff will just get in the way.

Sounds like a "typical" Western, doesn't it? But The Dead Don't Hurt, written/directed/starring Viggo Mortenson*, is only familiar in outline form and goes about things quite a bit differently. Mortenson strips away the rituals of Westerns, the shoot-outs, the robberies, the culture clashes with Natives, the chases (other than a brief one), the courtliness between men and women, and shows us the bare-bones and foundations of building a life in the wilderness, where people by necessity are "gig-workers" making use of whatever talents they have to scrape a living out of the dirt. You have to be tough, resilient, and oh-so-patient to eke out an existence, using Nature but fighting it back lest it overcome you.

Mortenson's characters have depth. They seem to have lives off-screen when we don't see them, histories and, hopefully, futures. More is spoken across someone's face than from their lips. And as there is not one Native in the entire movie, it drives home the point that the country was re-tooled under the auspices of immigrants, bringing their pasts with them. The film even feels like a "foreign" film, concentrating on the small moments, lingering on the consequential ones, and the violent ones are over in the time it takes to stop a heart.

There is another aspect to it that I like and always have been fond of—it's non-linear, starting with the death of one character and telling her story in flash-back, but not in an obvious, telegraphed way. The only way you can make the realization that a jump has happened is in paying attention to Olsen's facial hair, starting out with a brushy moustache, and his later, post-Civil War scenes, with a full beard, thus relieving any distracting questions ("Gee, what did he do with the kid?") that will pull you out of the movie—as I sometimes experienced. There are no exclamatory time-stamps holding your hand and making things obvious, but merely relying on the images on-screen to tell the story, the details of which orient you in situ.

I like that. And it allows Mortenson to juggle the story-line in a dramatic way to allow the story to evolve and not be fronted solely by a love story and back-ended by a revenge plot. Time stretches, evolves, and we learn more in this structure than by a simplistic start-middle-end timeline. Things seem to matter more. The character of Vivienne seems to matter more, as she is the center around which the movie revolves.

And in this structure, the film feels more like a memory, a totem of the woman we see dying in the beginning. Despite her early demise in the film, we see her life unfold in the flashbacks, the decisions she makes, the things she endures. It's really her film and the character haunts it—like we're seeing it play out in the moment of her death. And the performance of Krieps is a wonder to behold, played out with restraint, choosing her battles, internalized, not being dramatic about it. Enduring. It's a cliché to say that it's an award-winning performance—it has to be recognized first, and to do that, people have to see it, and I doubt the movie will get the attention it deserves to garner her such acclaim.

Which is a pity. This is already one of my favorite movies of the year (it clicks so many of my "this-makes-a-good-movie" boxes, which run counter to the adrenaline-fueled roller-coasters that drive the weekend box office figures), and I wish people will go out to theaters to see it. It's a big screen movie—especially with the sound—and it will lose a lot on a small video screen, and—god forbid!—on a telephone. It's an appointment movie, where time needs to stop to appreciate it and take it in. But, we live in a different time and a different sensibility than the one portrayed.

More's the pity. But, the mysteries of The Dead Don't Hurt are still percolating through my mind, and it may take another visit to fully appreciate just how good it is.

 

I can't wait.

* He composed the music, too...and is one of the musicians who played it.  

Marlowe (2022)

Saturday is traditionally "Take Out the Trash" Day...

The Permanent Wave

or
A Tarantula on an Angel Food Cake

I have read everything by Raymond Chandler—the novels, the short-stories, the essays—and I've always loved his writing. His plots sometimes suffered, but the writing...the prose. The hysterical metaphors. There was a bemused humor behind the familial carnage that Chandler cranked out, and a jaded realization that behind every fortune there was some crime involved, and that, if you looked close enough, Tinsel-town was as rusty an old scow. What Chandler wrote was thrilling, even if the plots were mundane, with a depth of consciousness and virtue that a lot of pulp-writers couldn't be bothered with.  

 

Chandler wrote: “Without magic, there is no art. Without art, there is no idealism. Without idealism, there is no integrity. Without integrity, there is nothing but production." Philip Marlowe, Chandler's private detecting knight in crusted armor could have easily said those words, but he wouldn't. Especially the "magic" part. Marlowe would be watching the hands and checking for wires, and be amused while he was doing it. Like his perpetual solo chess-games.

And I've written a lot about Chandler here: the movies—a lot of them—and I had a deep affection for the TV series out of Canadian TV and HBO decades ago, the ones that starred Powers Boothe as "Philip Marlowe, Private Eye." Marlowe's a good part and most people are good at playing him—Bogart, Powell, Mitchum, both Montgomery's, Garner—even Elliott Gould had a nice "take" on the character, although director Robert Altman seemed to think of Marlowe as an out-of-date fool—"Rip Van Marlowe", he called him. So, Marlowe is good for the most part.

But, you can get Chandler wrong. One has to merely look at Michael Winner's remake of The Big Sleep, with Mitchum (who came to the part late), for what "stands out like a tarantula on an angel food cake." The money for that production came from Lord Lew Grade, so (of course) it had to be set in England. Metaphorically speaking, it's the wrong side of the road. America—and Los Angeles, in particular—was young and finding its feet, exploding with development and cash (but no water) but (changing tenses here) with the rush of money comes an emotional adolescence, that one couldn't conceive of in "old money" families. Every family has a black sheep, or secret. But, there are usually structures in place to keep everything "in house." Marlowe's job was usually to roust the cattle after the proverbial barn-door was left negligently open.

Marlowe, the latest film with the character—titular because the source novel, "The Black-Eyed Blonde"* (written by John Banville under the nom de plume Benjamin Black) has a title that implies abuse—tries to evoke the period and the convoluted scenarios that Marlowe regularly skulked, but is a misfire in so many ways that one is just tempted to ash-can with the couple other bad adaptations that have rumbled down the boulevard over the years. And one should state the obvious first: Neeson is too old to be playing Marlowe. True, there is less stunt-work needed to be done, so it's more suitable for the actor's age, but Marlowe was a perpetual 37-45 in the books. Mitchum was too old to play him at 57 in Farewell, My Lovely. Neeson is 70. It makes the redundant smashing of a chair over an already out-cold sparring partner entertainingly apt, but this Marlowe is decades too old to be duking it out with thugs and peeping through people's windows. Marlowe would regularly have his bell rung in the books, but this is the first time I've ever worried about him breaking a hip. There's a difference between being world-weary and just-plain haggard.

And, yes, the film is financed by Irish firms for Irish artists—Neil Jordan directs—but Neeson is also too Irish to be playing Marlowe, his Americanisms slipping with "yer's" and dropped "g's" (although accents usually don't bother me). He wears a three-piece suit—which I can't imagine Marlowe doing unless it was a formal dinner—and (for cryin' out loud), he has a secretary in the office. Marlowe was too loan-wolfish and, more importantly, not that successful to afford one.

They got the louvers right...

 

The story (adapted by William Monahan, who hasn't done an improvement on anything except The Tender Bar) is not much: Clare Cavendish (Diane Kruger) is shown into Marlowe's office ("How private are you?") with a job that requires discretion: her lover Nico Pederson (François Arnaud) has disappeared and she wants to know what happened to him without alerting her jerk of a husband. Nico was doing some studio work, but also had a, shall we say, "importing business" as well, the likes of which involve local crime-boss Lou Hendricks (Alan Cumming), local "bordello" manager Floyd Hanson (Danny Huston), a well-connected studio-head (Mitchell Mullen), who just happens to be involved with star Dorothy Quincannon (Jessica Lange, who is doing a tremendous job at the start of her "Kate Hepburn" eccentricity-acting phase). To paraphrase the detective: So many relations, so few brains. You could figure things out, just by following the strings attached.

Any joys are few and far between: everybody smokes, the women all have shellaced permanent waves, and sometimes the location work done in Barcelona, Spain could make you believe they found some un-gentrified corner of Los Angeles—if you squinted through the bottom of a half-empty shot-glass, that is. It doesn't quite pencil and smacks of trying to stretch a budget until you hear it snap. That stuff's always trouble. And the dialog by everybody is too clever by-half. You want them to just talk without being so damned witty. There is a nice line of dialog as Cavendish exits Marlowe's office, "You're very perceptive and sensitive, Mr. Marlowe. I imagine it gives you trouble."

I imagine a better movie, maybe finding something a little closer to home, maybe with Ron Livingston or Kyle Chandler as Marlowe, and fewer Chinatown call-backs (although the movie-eye-make-up bit produced a snort out of me). I imagine a lot of things, but I can't imagine a duller version of Chandler—or Banville—than this one.

* "The Case of the Black-Eyed Blonde" was the 37th episode of the Raymond Burr "Perry Mason" series, based on Earle Stanley Gardner's 25th book, published in November, 1944.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Noooooooo! Written at the time of the film's release....

Shmukt!: Claws for Alarm

   

When the X-Men movies lost its chief stylist Bryan Singer to do Superman Returns it was a double disappointment. X-Men III: The Last Stand was the most expensive movie ever made—at the time), and looked terrible. Top-heavy with stars that not only bloated the budget but capsized the script to fulfill their demands, it brought the X-series to a sad ending, x-hausted, x-cessive, and x-cremental (while Superman Returns felt like going to The Church of Kal-El and Klan).

 

Time to re-boot, so here we have, rising as he always does from his own ashes, "Wolverine Begins" with Hugh Jackman reprising his break-out role. It's a smart move. Jackman was "the" star of the "X-men" movies and after the first, they were tailored for him, like his strategically ripped wife-beaters. One is hard-pressed to think of another movie where he is used so effectively (and succeeded at the box-office).

But this is a curious re-boot. At a time when most super-hero movies are dusting off the cliches, X-Men Origins: Wolverine (the title says it all) coats itself in the dust and the muck and the mire and revels in it. For instance: there is not one, but two scenes where Jim Logan (Jackman) looks up at a conveniently omniscient overhead camera and yells his frustration to the skies and his x-communicating God.

 

Are you kidding me? Hasn't that shot been decommissioned after all the easy laughs it's garnered on "The Daily Show?"**

It has. But nobody told director Gavin Hood (Rendition). He seems unconcerned about cliches or recycled material (or "sell-past" dates), as the movie lurches like lead villain Sabretooth (Liev Schreiber, but it was Tyler Mane in the original where they didn't know each other) bounding from one bad idea to the next, linked as they are by that most mainstream of transitions—the one-to-one dissolve. We get a lot of them in the Main Title. After the Bruce-Wayne-Meets-Oedipus childhood trauma opening, Hood shows the brothers Logan fighting in war after war, guns fading into guns and helmets into helmets. It's quite "artily" if unimaginatively done,* but Hood keeps using it until you start looking for the detail he might use in the next transition. Flames? Ocean waves? How about a dusk to dawn transition? That hasn't been done since...well, since I started writing this.

A lot of the problem is that Marvel—"The House of Ideas," as it likes to trumpet—has culled so much from other stories that the whole Wolverine opus reads like a Reader's Digest Omnibus of Comic Literature. Logan gets recruited to join a Dirty X-Dozen black-ops unit, then declares himself "Wolverine no more" and becomes a lumberjack (and that's okay) until his school-teacher gal-pal is killed, and he swears revenge (cue the overhead camera and the underhanded cliche). 

He then submits to a "Frankenstein" experiment under the control of his former superior Stryker (Danny Huston, prequeling for Brian Cox), that coats his skeleton with indestructible adamantium. He escapes Stryker, and hides out with an old farm couple, the Kent's...er, no, the Hudson's, before being attacked—again—and hooking up with Gambit (Taylor Kitsch) for a full assault on the villain's headquarters, where like Spartacus, he leads a "mutie" revolt, that includes a young Scott Summers (Tim Pocock, looking like Ben Stiller rather than James Marsden). 

Ryan Reynolds' first depiction of Deadpool, an event which he never forgot and has inspired countless jokes about Hugh Jackman, as well as a very popular larky film about the character—...oh, and Deadpool 2.

 

There are lots of Marvel folk appearing (briefly): Bolt, Deadpool, The Blob, Agent Zero, and Kestrel. The inconsistency with their comic-book counter-parts will drive some fan-boys nuts (not to mention Wolverine's brylcreemed pompadour from the first two films is gone, too). This fan-boy had trouble with the fights, all based on other movies: the war action from Saving Private Ryan (by way of Crank), another based on John Woo's hyper-dramatics and aerodynamics, and another, straight out of the "Star Wars" prequels. 

So much recycled material to so little effect. Using the character's own onomatopoeia, it's ten pounds of snikt!TM in a five pound bag.  

"C'mere, Kid. Got a lousy movie to show ya!"

* If you ever want to see it done to death, check out Danny DeVito's direction of Hoffa. 

** A word of explanation from 2021: This refers to "The Daily Show" when Jon Stewart was hosting it...he'd make frequent use of an overhead shot (in moments of duress) and scream to the heavens "Noooooooooooooo!" Often they'd put a reverberating echo on it (That's how it SHOULD be done!)

*** Spoiler Alert: Good place to put spoilers, isn't it? In case you think you're missing something, you're not. There's a cameo by Professor X (Patrick Stewart reprising his role), although why is Scott (Cyclops) the only guy X was reaching out to?—seems he could have contacted all the escaping mutants (because it would have killed the suspense is why), and the by-now standard "Marvel Tag" at the end of the credits is no big deal—Wolverine at a bar: "Drinking to forget?" "No. Drinking to remember." Supposedly, there are three others. If they're all that "good," don't bother collecting them all.

Robin Hood (2010)

I mentioned Ridley Scott's version of the "Robin Hood" story last week (which started as a screenplay called "Nottingham"). Here is a review of the resulting film, written at the time of its release.

"Rise...and Rise Again...and Again...and Again"

Every fifteen years or so, there must be a big budget remake of the "Robin Hood" legend—that's a bit less than the turnaround cycle for The Compleate Works of Jane Austen. The last time the fletches flew on the big screen there were two competing Hoods—the flashy Kevin Reynolds/Kevin Costner version and one starring Patrick Bergin. Before them was Robin and Marian, various series, and The Adventures of Robin Hood, the Warner Bros. classic with Errol Flynn, which was itself a remake of silent versions. Then, there have been satiric vignettes in Shrek and Time Bandits,* Mel Brooks

has done a movie (Men in Tights) AND a series ("When Things Were Rotten")—Mel loves his Public Domain. Disney has touched on it a couple times as well, including an animated funny animals version.

The character and his ancillary co-stars have a long oral tradition with many variations of "The Hode," so it's natural that someone drums him up for another "Have at ye" every few years, each reflecting the times in which they were made. Robin has been yeoman and nobleman, Crusader and thief, trickster and military man, young and old.

Although we've been down this well-trod pathe in the glenne before, it was interesting to think about what the Gladiator team of Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe could do with the story, and how they would approach it. And the answer is: with a little bit of everything. Scott with the help of scenarist Brian Helgeland** has a Robin Hood, an orphan Saxon Crusading with Richard the Lionheart (Danny Huston-he's great in this), who's an expert bowman and strategist by day, and a grifter by night. At the end of the Crusades, he is given a task, the complications of which lead him to Nottingham and the masquerade of being Robert Loxley, slain son of Sir Walter Loxley (Max von Sydow) and spouse of Lady Marian Loxley (Cate Blanchett)—this Robin is both commoner and gentry.

The Sheriff of Nottingham (Matthew McFadyen) is not given much to do this time 'round, instead the intrigues are by Sir Godfrey (Mark Strong) and King Phillip of France, who plot to undermine the already shaky reign of the new King John (Oscar Isaac), the last son of King Henry and Eleanor of Aquitaine (Eileen Atkins), and invade England.

The general structure of Robin Hood is superficially similar to “Gladiator” with big battles at both ends, and Scott uses the same stutter-shutter technique to give some verve to the action scenes. But there it ends. Crowe is considerably lighter as Robin Hood, though he does summon up genuine moments of drama. Performances are fine all around with Cate Blanchett and William Hurt (as William Marshall, the first Earl of Pembroke) being stand-outs. But the best performance is by Max von Sydow as the elderly Sir Walter. Blind, but nobody’s fool, Sir Walter takes the news of his son’s death with grim determination and courtesy for its messenger, and comes up with the Robin-as-Loxley ruse to protect Marion from having their land confiscated should he die. Von Sydow has been ill-used of late, playing teutonic villains of similar coldness, but this role shows him at full thespian power, and it would be robbery if he was not nominated for an Oscar for this performance.

The film boasts good values all around, with Scott’s keen eye for cinematography and detail, the writing is clever and often ingenious (I think the fact that it's another Robin Hood movie sours a lot of people's expectations). The film never drags and offers considerable entertainment value. Only at the end does it falter, with a beach battle that seems overly-stretched in terms of production value and credibility. Either there was not enough planning or extras, but it looks to be constructed to not show something as opposed to creating an epic battle. Too much is made of the presence of landing craft as obstacles, and of one particular participant in the clamor, which seems to be done for scoring political points rather than good story-telling. 

But that is twenty minutes out of 140. For the most part, this new Robin Hood hits its mark. Yes, it might be superfluous (we can say this—with a straight face—with so many sequels headed our way?), but what's there on the screen is an interesting "take" on the legend that has lasted so long.

* John Cleese's immaculate nobleman with a "Bonny Prince Charlie" manner is one of my favorites.

** The original script, by the team of Ethan Rieff and Cyrus Voris, called "Nottingham," was more radical, but interesting in a concept-twist kind of way, but once Ridley Scott came on board, the concept changed.