It ticks every box you could wish for in your olde worlde trash: Sean Bean as the Sheriff of Nottingham, faerie smut … and not a bad wig in sight! Hurrah!
Faerie smut you say? Well…
I so much want there to be a better Robin Hood since Prince of Thieves.
I know Men in Tights is widely loved, but it’s a parody. Even so, it’s at least as valid as the Disney cartoon, and to my eyes, equally enjoyable.
The 2010 Robin Hood with Russel Crowe was trash IMO. The more recent one with Taron Egerton was trash too, but it was fun trash. I enjoyed it once.
My second favorite Robin Hood is the one from 1938, The Adventures of Robin Hood. Then the Disney one, then Men in Tights — but the three of them are very close to one another.
Prince of Thieves was 34 years ago! And Kevin Costner couldn’t pull off an English accent, so Kevin Reynolds told him to stop trying. Kevin Reynolds went on to make a bunch of other great movies around the same time, and IIRC he also made the really good Count of Monte Cristo.
The difference is, most Count of Monte Cristo adaptations are good! Even the anime set in the far future with its nauseating animation style. Even the ABC soap opera Revenge. Is The Count of Monte Cristo really that much better than Robin Hood? I don’t think it should be, but its adaptations hit harder and I think there are more of them. Though Dumas has enjoyed a bit more popularity with The Three Musketeers and The Man in the Iron Mask. People like Dumas and they know it’s fiction. Robin Hood has been presented as fact and widely disproven as anything more than myth.
Is The Count of Monte Cristo really that much better than Robin Hood? I don’t think it should be, but its adaptations hit harder and I think there are more of them.
Speculating here, but maybe the rich people that pay for these adaptations to be produced find it easier to relate to Dantès, who starts poor and ends rich than Loxley (or however they want to spell it this time), who starts as an aristocrat and becomes an outlaw.
Dantès does most of the “work” of the story himself; sometimes he gets a plucky sidekick, depending on the adaptation of the book. Loxley, in almost all of the adaptations I’ve seen, bands together with the common folk and leads them to rise up against oppression inflicted on them by the greed of one or two men.
I’m probably stretching it a bit, but if I was a billionaire deciding what people get to watch, I assume the Count would scare me less than a band of commoners overthrowing their rich oppressors.
Then again, even though I’m common as they come, I’ll admit that I like Dumas’s coherence and Dantès’s complexity more than the looser jumble that comes with the Robin Hood myth. Monte Cristo will probably always be at the top of my list of books to read and reread every couple of years until I’m dead, simply because it has everything for a fun adventure story — a simple guy, the woman he loves, the enemies (and one drunk sot) who betray him, a wise mentor, growth through adversity, revenge, saving your friends from bankruptcy and suicide, helping nice people marry each other, realizing that revenge tends to not limit its damage to the targets you choose, more growth, and…weirdly marrying that nice lady you bought.
Okay, the last thing is a bit odd and Haydée gets left out of some adaptations, which is a bit of a shame, since the scene with Dantès and Mercédès where they realize they’ve become different people than they were when they were in love 800 pages ago, and they’ll never be together and that’s okay, is probably my favorite part in the whole thing. Someday, someone will do that scene well.
We are lacking in that department. It’s a great story, it’s surprising few people made it work
Have you seen the British Robin Hood series, Robin of Sherwood, from the mid 80s? I watched it for the first time a year ago and I thought it was great.
Prince of Thieves was good, but it felt a bit a too “Kevin Kosner plays as Kevin Kosner” if you know what I mean. I say this as a huge fan of 90s Kevin Kosner movies (Waterworld, Dances with Wolves, Postman).
Will need to check out The Adventures of Robin Hood.
I have not seen the Crowe version, I remember feedback being rather negative when it came out.
The cartoon Disney version from the 70s is great and I generally don’t like musicals.
The version reviewed in OP doesn’t sound like my cup of tea.
