1. We have Robin Hood to thank for the Magna Carta.
2. It takes a band of men less than a week to sack a dozen towns from York to Peterborough.
3. All English monarchs are idle, self-involved and idiotic. French monarchs are strategically minded, cunning, and intelligent.
4. ‘The Odyssey’ is a strange, but welcome, inspiration for the second act of a movie with this subject matter.
5. Robin Hood is a ‘Big Society’ Tory.
6. Women may command troops in battle, but only if their troops consist of children, and their presence is in no way vital or commented upon.
7. The repeated use of day-for-night filming techniques in the twenty-first century smacks first of genius, then of weirdness, and finally of boredom.
8. French rapists prefer cunnilingus.
9. Director Ridley Scott can do ‘historical epic’ in his sleep, but ‘cheeky family fun’ is not his forte.
10. Historical accuracy be damned: Cate Blanchett demands foundation and she demands it by the ton.
11. Convoluted scripts aren’t necessarily good scripts.
12. Innuendo-laced comments about Little John are funny.
13. Mark Addy’s boisterous portrayal of Friar Tuck is most avowedly not funny.
14. Protagonists in Hollywood fare must find meaning and purpose only through a new understanding of what a great man their father was (see also ‘Iron Man 2’, ‘Star Trek’)
15. When the hero rides towards battle a subordinate must throw him a sword.
16. Even when creeping political correctness demands an absurdly re-imagined Maid Marian, it is still acceptable to vilify both the Church and the French.
17. If you’re going to feature a beach-based swords-and-arrows battle as your climax, why not go ahead and make a movie about the Battle of Marathon instead?
18. There was more twelfth century ambience in thirty seconds of the recent ‘Valhalla Rising’ than there is in all 140 long minutes of this.
19. Peter Jackson should sue for royalties.
20. Robin Hood spent more time launching military campaigns on the seashore than he did as an outlaw in the woods.
21. When the animated closing credits of your film are more ingenious – and bloodier – than what has come before, there’s something amiss.
22. If this is the best this creative team can come up with then the inevitable sequels are going to be very hard work.
2 comments:
beach battles - smacks of a more ambitious Saving Private Ryan to me (as in saving the whole of the English nation rather than one American GI).j
re. Point Number 9. Ridley Scott can indeed do historical epic in his sleep. Unfortunately, he did.
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