Robin Hood

The latest Robin Hood has something for almost everyone, be they Tea Partygoers, Christian radicals, apiarists, Francophobes or fletchers. Fans of Russell Crowe, however, may be disappointed.

His Robin Longstride, later aka Sir Robert Loxley and Robin of the Hood, is a glum middle-ageing archer who's spent a decade on the Crusades serving England's King Richard the Lionheart. Meanwhile, back in the Tower of London, his younger brother, John, hates their mummy (Eileen Atkins as an imperious Graecoid choral figure), frolics with a relative of the French king and conspires with an evil knight, Godfrey, to take over the realm and its northern barons' wealth.

There are many other plot details and historical figures shoehorned into the 2.5-hr-long epic, and most of the star-studded cast strut and fret effectively. Max von Sydow chews the medieval scenery juicily as old blind Sir Walter Loxley who, so miraculously it's comic, enables the sad hero to experience instant recall of his heroic daddy's death.

It would take at least 2.5 hours to note all the screenwriter's other historical footnotes and mythical imaginings. Cut to the chase, moviegoers will be sighing while a further conspiratorial angle is being hatched by the dastardly French. You'll know who's French because they speak a subtitled language. This is helpful, and attentive moviegoers need similar attention to detail (armorial nasal defences) to distinguish who's fighting whom in the battle sequences.

Director Ridley Scott is a good battle maestro. As in a previous Scott-Crowe epic, Master and Commander, sound effects are cineplex delights during fast-cut collages of marine warfare. The final coastal fight is a self-consciously thrilling visual treat too, clearly designed by Scott to show Hollywood that Speilberg's similar set-piece in Saving Private Ryan was nothing special.

Sound effects add valid period details frequently, as when Crowe is disrobed of his thunking chain mail by Lady Marion (Cate Blanchett delivering a welcome less dour personality than Crowe's). This provides ageing fans with their sole sighting of Crowe's overweighty chest and stomach. Compensation may be found with a dull dorsal review of King John, an attractively facially-coiffed breakthrough performance by a Guatemalan Floridian, Oscar Isaac.

His villain is a complex figure of evil fun, matched by the dastardly Sir Godfrey who's a complex figure of scarred evil. Mark Strong is in danger of being typecast, having also triumphed with his wicked ways in The Young Victoria and Sherlock Holmes. Oh, the English do evil so well, I chortled, recalling how Alan Rickman's Sheriff of Nottingham had out-acted Kevin Costner's Robin Hood. Then I discovered that Strong (his real given name) is of Austrian-Italian origin. The movie's bumbling Sheriff is the weakest link in this feudal axis of evil. Accidentally, perhaps, the Tower's leading good guy is played by an American, William Hurt, whose accent and stance are dryly English.

On reflection, over dinner with a friend who almost totally enjoyed the movie, I agreed that there was a lot to admire in Scott's visualisation of a convoluted scenario. But, we also agreed, not the over-emphatic musical soundtrack.