Movie Review: Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves

“Cancel the kitchen scraps for lepers and orphans, no more merciful beheadings, and call off Christmas.”

This movie is an absolute turkey: overstuffed, bland, and way too American. It’s also 143 minutes long, but those are 1990s minutes. Adjusted for 2020s inflation, that’s approximately infinite amounts of time.

The basic plot is mostly like every other Robin Hood movie we’ve seen so far: crusader Robin returns to find himself dispossessed. Cue the Merry Men of Sherwood Forest, Little John, fire arrows, rebellion, yada yada yada. The Sheriff of Nottingham is the bad guy. Maid Marian is, of course, the love interest. It ends with a wedding and the return of King Richard, played by Sean Connery, who is so very sexy in a way I can't explain.

But wait! You remember the 1990s. The glorious excesses of post-Cold War, pre-9/11 American life, don’t you? It was “the end of history,” and the dawning of a brilliant neoliberal age. That means that a Robin Hood story can’t just be about taxes, or freedom, or bromances. So this movie adds more. So much more.

For example: the sheriff has a group—a klan, we might call them—of guys who wear white hoods and lynch homeowners like Robin’s dad. We see them once and never again. The sheriff is so evil he wants to cancel Christmas. He also has a witch buddy who might be his mom (but to be honest I kinda played on my phone during parts of this film and didn’t pay much attention). She’s scary to look at and uses mahjong tiles to tell the future. Also, bloody eggs. He’s bad at sex, he’s too vain, he’s fixated on Maid Marian, he has subverted the church and wants to gain power for himself, he stabs his own cousin and wears all black and is played by Alan Rickman, who is the only person in the film who knows the sort of film it ought to have been.

And then there are the subplots: Will Scarlet is Robin’s half-brother—a third act reveal! Little John has a family, including a plucky youngster named Wulf and a lovely wife named Fanny. (Brief sidenote: At one point, Fanny casually greets Little John with the words “hello, lover” and a weird frisson of recognition ran through me—I remembered being enchanted with that exchange as a youngster watching this film, and somehow I still am. It’s the realest moment in the entire movie.)

Azeem, the Magical Negro played by Morgan Freeman, is in Robin’s debt, because although he is a Black Muslim, he seems to have read a mixed-up version that apocryphal Chinese concept of being responsible for someone whose life you’ve saved: he follows Robin to England to save him in the future, in gratitude for being rescued. I don’t care about the details, because Morgan Freeman plays an outsider, which means he’s the only one who reacts to all of the cheesy shenanigans appropriately, which is to say that he’s either bemused or truly disturbed.

Sometimes, things come out of nowhere. Like a bunch of Celts. I'm not kidding. The sheriff and his men (no longer wearing white hoods) raid Sherwood Forest, and someone shouts "They've brought Celts!" People react: "God save us" and "Allah be merciful." I guess no one expects surprise Celts in a Robin Hood movie. But these Celts suck: they fight for a bit in their daubs of blue paint and then run away, never to be seen again until they reappear in 1995 to rescue Mel Gibson in Braveheart.

There’s also a baby plot. Actually, there are two: Robin and Marian have premarital sex, she gets pregnant, she tries to send her cousin King Richard a letter, Nottingham intercepts it, he uses it as leverage to get her to marry him, etc. The second baby plot is even weirder: Little John’s wife Fanny goes into labor, but the baby is breech. No one, not one single peasant, knows what to do, so Morgan Freeman saves the day. And the baby.

I want to take a moment to say something about that. Actually, again, two things (in the spirit of this film’s extraness):

One: Prince of Thieves does do a good job of highlighting that MENA culture was far in advance of medieval western European culture in many areas, especially science and technology.

Two: peasants did, in fact, know how to deliver babies. Because it’s not like they went to the doctor. Peasants, specifically peasant midwives, helped other peasants deliver babies. Peasants are rural laborers. That doesn’t make them idiots, because medieval England was not a meritocracy. Their brains were just as full of stuff as any of our brains are full of stuff. Their stuff was just, to be honest, more useful than most of the stuff we know today.

But this film treats all the Merry Men, except for Little John, as absolute dolts. They can’t deliver babies. They can’t read. They can’t count. They don’t know their left from their right. The purpose, I assume, is comic relief. The result is a portrayal of Robin Hood as a necessary, educated, wealthy savior of people who don’t have the brains to save themselves.

Anyway, I’m getting distracted. Let’s talk about the film’s politics. Rather than reiterate previous Robin Hood reviews, I want to focus here on Friar Tuck, whose character is more developed in Prince of Thieves than in the previous films: he starts off as a drunkard in the pay of the bad guys, he manages to defeat Robin Hood in a fight, and then he realizes that the denizens of Sherwood are, in fact, “the meek of the earth.” He joins them, he protects the children, he fights with them, and he even kills the bad priest by overloading him with so much stolen gold that he falls out a window.

Friar Tuck, played by Michael McShane.

It's weird to imagine a Robin Hood story without Friar Tuck, but he’s actually an anachronism. Most Robin Hood stories are set during the late 1100s even though there weren’t many mendicant orders then. (The Carmelites, the first mendicant order, were founded in 1155.) Friars didn’t become a common sight in medieval Europe until the 1200s. Think of the Franciscans, who you’ve probably heard of, and who are the likely basis for Friar Tuck. (Or the Dominicans. Yeah, the Inquisition guys. Not all friars fought the good fight back then.)

According to Valerie Johnson of the Robin Hood Project, Friar Tuck first entered the Robin Hood tradition in the Tudor years. (There’s something to be said about his appearance within these stories during the rise of Protestantism in England, but this is really not the place for that argument.) Here is what Johnson has to say about his character in most Robin Hood stories:

Friar Tuck has enjoyed a relatively uncomplicated literary existence within the context of the Robin Hood tradition. His personality may alternate between cheerful and solemn, contemplative and self-absorbed, even gluttonous and parsimonious, but he is always a friar, sometimes a priest, and usually the member of Robin Hood's band who consistently stands out for his independence and affiliation with a system of belief that extends beyond the limits of the outlaws' own environs.

If Robin Hood stories are about power—and specifically, about a restoration of a given culture’s status quo—then Friar Tuck represents an interesting figure, one who stands outside of the financial issues (since he’s a mendicant) and outside of the royal/legal issues (since, although he’s subject to secular law, he’s also outside of secular social structures). Tuck, then, is the ultimate outsider. He’s like Snufkin in the Moomin stories. Or Franklin from Peanuts. Or Alfie from Peaky Blinders.

He—Friar Tuck in general, not just this Friar Tuck—might be my favorite character for that reason: he doesn’t have much at stake beyond wanting to make the right choices. He’s the only one who has nothing to gain from victory, after all. Yet he picks the side of the good.

This film’s version of Tuck also matters for thinking about the plot symmetry. Because there is some balance here, despite the baroque oddities of the subplots. Robin Hood kills Nottingham. Azeem kills the white witch. Little John defeats an executioner. And Friar Tuck kills the bad priest. Each protagonist character has a matching antagonist to defeat. That’s the best I can say about this movie, though, because I just didn’t enjoy rewatching it very much.

Some of that may be due to the fact that I don't like Kevin Costner, although my mother had a crush in him because of Field of Dreams. I did like Dances with Wolves before I was educated enough to know better. But my opinion of the man might best be summed up to my reaction to the trailer for The Art of Racing in the Rain. Costner voiced the dog character, a golden retriever. I couldn't stop laughing. He is a golden retriever of a human, and I'm a cat person.

I do wish I’d liked this movie more, not just because watching it was a slog, but also because I did like it as a kid. Now that I have a more developed taste, I see that it’s bloated and dull, although there are moments when suddenly you get an extreme close up of Alan Rickman's inverted face and realize that it could have been magisterial. But by trying too hard to be good, it wound up being mediocre. For that reason:

Two out of four spoons. Why a spoon? Because it’s dull, you twit. It’ll hurt more.

Current Ranking of Robin Hood Movies:

• Absolute Best: Disney Robin Hood
• Most Anarchic: Robin Hood (2018)
• Funniest?: Men in Tights, I guess
• Most Bloated: Prince of Thieves

Josie Kafka is a full-time cat servant and part-time rogue demon hunter. (What's a rogue demon?)

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