This was emphatically not going to be your grandpa’s Robin Hood. (Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe would try an even grimier, history-minded take on Robin Hood in 2010, to similarly desultory ends.) Costner’s battering ram of a performance is of a piece with Reynolds’s dark, gory, chaotic action-adventure, a film that more or less follows the legend by the numbers, but seems determined to make it as joyless as possible. Then again, Flynn would have been out of place in this conception of Robin Hood, which now seems like an innocent precursor to the “dark, gritty reboot” versions of classic characters that have popped up so frequently in the 21st century. His lack of an English accent, which is really more like a lack of commitment to any accent in particular, got the most attention, but it’s a much more comprehensively stilted performance. Other than the feathery resplendence of Costner’s golden locks – between him, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and Alan Rickman, the film deserved an Oscar for Most Hairstyling – there was no lightness to him at all in the role. The fact that the film was second only to Terminator 2: Judgment Day at the box office made him right for the lead role, despite the objections of critics who, by and large, strongly believed he was woefully miscast. (It’s Bull Durham.)Īnd so when Costner teamed up with his friend Kevin Reynolds, the director who had made his career by casting the then-unknown actor in 1985’s Fandango, for Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, no one was going to question whether he was right for the lead role. The director-star’s western epic had been dismissed as a vanity project, “Kevin’s Gate”, right up until the moment critics and audiences embraced it wholeheartedly, and he was in the middle of a run of late-80s hits that included The Untouchables, No Way Out, and a pair of baseball movies, Bull Durham and Field of Dreams, that still inspire arguments over which is the best ever made about the sport. Kevin Costner was the biggest star in Hollywood, still collecting money and plaudits for Dances with Wolves well into 1991, getting the best of Goodfellas in a best picture race that was, frankly, not that much of a nail-biter.
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