Robin Hood Review: 2 Ups & 7 Downs
2. The Wildly Inconsistent Tone
Robin Hood is fundamentally a movie that doesn't know what it wants to be.
On one hand, it's an achingly self-serious slog of a film in which it genuinely believes itself to be a gritty, hard-edged reinvention of the legend, but every so often, Friar Tuck will show up to drop a few goofy one-liners which clash harshly with some of the film's more brutal moments.
Similarly, the film doesn't really know what to do with Robin Hood himself. At times he's depicted as a chirpy charmer (though Egerton's performance is so flat you'd barely realise), while at other times he's so stoic and straight-faced it ends up unintentionally comical.
The end result is a film that, despite having only two credited screenwriters, feels like it was pushed and pulled in different directions by various creatives. There's no clear mood for the audience to cling to, so it ends up feeling rather schizophrenic.