Robin Hood

Actors:  Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett, William Hurt, Mark Strong, Max Von Sydow, Oscar Isaac, Mark Addy

Rating:  8 out of 10, Crowe teams up with director Ridley Scott again for an historical epic.  This is a really solid movie with an incredible cast at the top of their game trying to reinvent the Robin Hood legend.  I had forgotten how good this movie was, even my wife enjoyed it and she’s not the historical epic kind of gal.  As a student of history I was a little incredulous with some of the leaps they took the hero through.  Going from a simple archer to leading an entire army and serving as the author of the Magna Carta was just a bit of a stretch – read that to mean way too much.  Given that, the action scenes were extremely well done as was the bawdy edge the merry men enjoyed in Nottingham.  Strong is just a great villain, he has such screen presence.  As I was watching the actress playing Eleanor I kept thinking back to Katherine Hepburn playing the same character so well in The Lion in Winter.  Crowe only shows flashes of the charisma that made his character in Gladiator so compelling, he seems to have grown complacent.  He was definitely the weakest of the leads.

MVP:  Mark Strong as Godfrey, sociopath, traitor, Francophile friend of Prince John