Kevin Reynolds’s adventure has enough spirit to entertain in patches, but Kevin Costner makes a dutiful Robin and 143 minutes is too much. Alan Rickman’s Sheriff is the chief reason to consider it.
Kevin Reynolds’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves is a fitfully enjoyable adventure that spends too much of its 143 minutes waiting for somebody to liven it up. Usually that somebody is Alan Rickman, playing the Sheriff of Nottingham with a comic extravagance the rest of the film struggles to accommodate. Reynolds wants action, romance, social conscience and broad comedy in the same telling of the legend. There is room for all of them, but he keeps interrupting one to make space for another.
Kevin Costner’s Robin is the main difficulty. He gives the pursuit of justice a dutiful seriousness, but little of the pleasure in disobedience that would make us want to follow him. The screenplay by Pen Densham and John Watson keeps explaining what kind of hero he is, and Costner rarely makes the explanations unnecessary. A swashbuckling lead needs some ease, even when the business is dangerous; here the effort to be worthy weighs on the performance.
Rickman has no such difficulty enjoying himself. We laughed at his florid bluster, because he makes the Sheriff’s authority seem so dependent on everybody indulging his bad temper. The performance is broad enough to disrupt the film, and not every comic flourish belongs beside its more solemn passages. Yet Rickman gives the dialogue a lift and a change of pace that the central performance badly needs.
Morgan Freeman’s Azeem and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio’s Marian help in quieter ways. Freeman brings a welcome steadiness, and Mastrantonio gives Marian an alertness that holds our attention without competing with Rickman’s excesses. Their performances make the script’s determination to provide something for everybody briefly seem workable. But Densham and Watson have crowded the adventure with competing tones, and even the stronger supporting players cannot make those changes feel natural.
Reynolds is more persuasive when staging action. Douglas Milsome’s roving camera makes familiar swashbuckling business feel busy and inviting, though the movement sometimes adds to the film’s untidiness. John Graysmark’s production design makes the adventure feel solid enough for the action to matter, even when the comic performances are pulling us away from danger. Michael Kamen’s music pushes the heroism hard, sometimes giving a routine passage more conviction than the acting can supply.
Peter Boyle’s editing cannot reconcile the urge to hurry with the amount of material in Densham and Watson’s script. Individual stretches have energy, but the 143-minute running time allows the changes from earnestness to comic excess to become tiring. We grew restless whenever the film returned to explaining its good intentions, having already understood them. A shorter telling would not fix Costner’s casting, but it might let the more spirited performances carry us further.
A swashbuckler needs us to enjoy the hero’s company through the quieter passages as well as the action, and this one asks for more patience than Costner earns. Enthusiasts may find the supporting cast sufficient compensation, but there are long stretches without the comic energy that makes the film worth considering. Go for Rickman, and be prepared to wait for him.
