Robin Hood (2010)
Going to do my best to keep this tight because this is something that'll appear in my dissertation. Ultimately, what Ridley Scott seems interested in doing here is creating an origin story for the outlaw. The entirety of the film is about establishing why and how Robin Hood becomes "Robin of Loxley" (with an X for some reason) and his feuds with Prince John and the Sherriff of Nottingham, which, in this version, he should technically be lord of.
I think that, in this, the movie is unable to give us much of the joy and energy that makes Robin Hood films of the past so enjoyable. For example, the color palette is, as movies based on the medieval often are, exceptionally drab. Early in the film, during which he is Robin Longstride, Crowe wears what is closest to our vision of Robin Hood's outfit. Yet, I could not even detect his signature Lincoln green. If he wore green, it was a dark, practically grey version, with none of the vivacity that marks previous versions.
What I'd like to really mention in this movie, though, are its two major innovations, to my mind: the first is a more nuanced King John. In most previous adaptations, John is an effete, almost lethargic ruler. He has no interest in ruling the kingdom, merely plundering it for his own riches. In the Disney version, you may remember he is a goofy, easily fooled idiot who cannot even see his jewels being stolen in front of his eyes. Here, our first scene of King John is him having an illicit romp with a French princess and he later shows a great deal of energy and even makes a promise to honor THE MAGNA CARTA, which he of course walks back, but it's an interesting choice, nonetheless. Additionally, John pushes back on his mother often, pointing out he is the "runt of eight children" and referencing his brother, the beloved King Richard, as someone not to hate, but as someone to live up to.
The other major innovation is the invention of the character Godfrey. There is no antecedent to this character in the canon of Robin Hood, and for much of the film, I was asking myself why they did not choose to make this character Guy of Gisbourne, a stock villain in any other Robin Hood adaptation. Instead, Godfrey is a presumably part-French consult of King John who has decided to make a deal with King Phillip of France to help divide England and make it easier to conquer. Why? Unclear--his motivations are literally never discussed. Our closest is a scene in which he kills a man who says "You are English" and his response is simply "when it suits me." Overall, he's a sneering, unabashedly evil man, seeming to take joy in bloodshed and commanding his men to burn houses full of people down for no reason. Is he complex? Not at all. But, it's a new sort of hitch to the narrative.
Viewed as just a movie, it's fine. Like, I didn't hate it and it doesn't drag in the way that Prince of Thieves does. But, I think where it really fails is that it feels less like the inheritance of Prince of Thieves and Adventures of Robin Hood and more like it belongs to The Lord of the Rings franchise. I felt this while watching it, but when in the finale, Marion appears in knight's armor, played by the same woman who did it in Lord of the Rings, I about lost my mind. Scott chooses to make the scale of this movie enormous (at one point crossing 200 miles on horseback in two days!) which makes it feel more "Epic." But epic has never been the hallmark of Robin Hood--the ironic nature of Robin Hood is that his stories are often small, localized adventures, almost always deeply embedded in Nottingham and the surrounding Sherwood forest. By making it a larger, grandiose narrative about the fate of England fighting France, all that Scott manages to do is invoke several elements--several locations bear the names of important locales in the medieval ballads--of the classic Robin Hood, but he ultimately loses sight of Sherwood Forest for the trees.