Robin Hood

Spoiler alert. If you have not watched the latest version of Robin Hood I am about to reveal a central and key point of the film. It is a reeking pile of fecal matter. Had I not needed to use the cinema’s toilet, the entire affair would have been a gratuitous waste of time that I’d have still been lamenting on my death bed.

The first words Russell Crowe spoke as Robin Hood genuinely made me laugh loudly from my seat at the back of the cinema. His take on the midlands accent makes him sound like a mixture of Sean Bean with throat cancer and a broken food disposal unit.

There’s really no redeemable feature to be found anywhere. The plot is a fresh take on the story, but only in the way that dropping a bag of saucepans is a fresh take on a Mozart piano concerto. The new angle serves only to provide an agonisingly slower plot route which bypasses most opportunities to provide some form of relief in the form of brutal battle scenes. Those that survive are almost spoof like in the way they disappoint, with slow motion screamed ‘noooooo’s’ producing troubling volumes of spittle and dissatisfyingly little blood.

Asides from a comically bad plot, poor acting and terrible direction, the editing stands out as a monument to awfulness, having been performed, it appears, by an autistic chimp with a chainsaw. Characters appear at seemingly random points in equally random places and previously unmentioned points take on sudden significance, leaving you with the impression that someone has sat on the remote.

All in all, I would recommend that you avoid the biting frustration I felt at having wasted two hours of my precious weekend, and do something more likely to offer a satisfying evening, like pouring lemon juice into open wounds.