Robin & Marian

The acting is wonderful. The scenery is gorgeous. The audience is treated with respect. The writing is wonderful. You can stop reading now, as this should be enough to make you buy the movie.

Two additional points: the movie contains the best once sentence describtion of the middle age mind set: "he was my king" and watch this movie and you will get Eddie Izzard's joke in his HBO stand up routine.


A great sequel...but to what?   January 19, 2004
JR Pinto (New Jersey)
This movie isn't so much a sequel to The Adventures of Robin Hood as it is to The Lion in Winter. James Goldman wrote the scripts for both and he seems to have a fetish for the Plantagenets. This movie opens with Robin and Little John in the service of a very mad Richard the Lionhearted (wonderfully played by the late Richard Harris). They make their way back to Sherwood to find that Maid Marian has become a nun. (A little tip: if, in a British legend, your girlfriend becomes a nun, you just know it is going to end badly.) The only person who seems truly happy to see Robin again after twenty years is the Sheriff of Nottingham (Robert Shaw). Watching him fight Sean Connery again, I felt as if this might also be a sequel to From Russia With Love!

The movie is a very good bittersweet romance between famous lovers in their later years. It is not on the same level as The Lion in Winter, but then, how few things are. Watching it, I was reminded how wonderful it is to see Connery act in a real role - instead of mouthing the inanities they give him now ("Welcome to the Rock!").

It is a very good period piece, made the way the used to make them. For any Sean Connery fan, it is a must.


A CHARACTER STUDY, NOT AN ACTION FILM   November 2, 2003
somebody nobody (neither here nor there)
In this version of the Robin Hood myth, an aged Robin and Little John played wonderfully by Nicol Williamson return to Sherwood and Nottingham after the death of Richard Lion Heart whom they followed on the Crusades. Upon their arrival, they encounter Tuck and Scarlett, forcibly recruit Marion who's now the Abbotess of a nunnery, and in doing so, re-initiate hostilities with the Sheriff of Nottingham. I can't blame anyone for being disappointed in this film; you hear the name Robin Hood and you automatically expect feats of Zen archery and balletic sword duels between Robin and The Sherriff of N. But while not as dynamic as other Robin Hood films, Robin and Marion is not as facile as those films either. This film is about people; it's not supposed to serve as a visual roller coaster. If you prefer comic books to literature, by all means stick with the Errol Flynn version, because Robin and Marion, while it may not be a great work, is still a good piece of literature. It's about being human and being alive, to which, in this film, the fighting is secondary. And while the fight between Robert Shaw and Sean Connery did look arthritic and clumsy, it was also a lot closer to a real fight than Flynn's bladed flashdance with Basil Rathbone (sp?) ever was.


The movie that made "Men In Tights" look good...   October 1, 2003
J. Bailey (Dallas, TX)
0 out of 3 found this review helpful

Pompous. Boring. Contrived.

This movie is not at all what it promised. If you want to see an over-the-hill rebel fight "city hall" and try to romance a post-menopausal woman, go for Bridges of Madison County

This is the movie that enabled that ghastly Kevin Costner film.

For Robin Hood, stick with Errol Flynn or the BBC. Connery doesn't do well in sword movies...


Gritty   August 28, 2003
Emily J. Jensen (Oklahoma City, OK United States)
Very raw. Not your typical Hollywood production. These two are no longer spring chickens either. More of the reality of an old love than the frills. Audrey Hepburn only gets better with age, and the butt shot of Sean Connery was an unexpected, funny bonus. This isn't a film I would purchase and watch over and over, but I enjoyed it. I give it 3 1/2 stars.