Robin Hood (2018)

Otto Bathurst's Robin Hood arrives with the confidence of a film that believes it has solved the legend. The Crusades are reframed as a cynical racket run by a corrupt church, the Sheriff extorts the commoners and ships them to coal mines, and Robin returns from the Holy Land to rob the crown on their behalf. The politics are not subtle. The church is a war profiteer, the aristocracy is a parasite, and the poor are virtuous by default. This is a heist picture wearing a hoodie, and it wants us to know it means something.

The casting supplies the most conspicuous gesture. Jamie Foxx plays John, a Moorish commander reimagined as Robin's partner and moral compass, a race-swap of a folkloric figure that the film never bothers to interrogate. Race sits in the frame without ever becoming a subject. Marian is handed a measure of agency, snooping into the church's plot and intervening in the resistance, but she spends much of the running time as a prize contested between Robin and Will. The eat-the-rich current is steadier, since every villain is a titled man hoarding grain and coin, though the film treats inequality as a costume and not a conviction.

The rest is a production straining toward relevance. Critics found it preachy and anachronistic, and they were not wrong. The anti-war sermonizing lands with a thud, and the leather jackets and machine-gun archery announce a modern sensibility that flatters the audience without challenging it. It is a flop, and a flop with a message is still a flop. The classification is straightforward: social consciousness applied like a decal, sincere in intent, thin in execution. The Sherwood of 2018 robs from the rich and gives to nobody in particular.