Riled Robin: Russell Crowe storms out of Radio 4 interview after being accused of giving hero an Irish accent 
 
 
 
 It was the equivalent of waving a red flag in front of a bull. 
 
 Russell Crowe - already smarting over the critics' reaction to his portrayal of Robin Hood - stood accused of making the hero of Sherwood Forest sound a little Irish. 
 
 Interviewer Mark Lawson should have known what was coming. 
 
 There was a simmering denial, an expletive or two and a rather sudden end to the conversation. 
 
 SCROLL DOWN TO LISTEN TO AUDIO (WARNING: CONTAINS BAD LANGUAGE) 
 
 Gladiators, ready! Russell Crowe became riled when Mark Lawson queried his accent on Radio 4 arts show Front Row 
 
 
 
 Crowe, who has a prickly reputation, had been talking to Lawson about his new film Robin Hood for BBC Radio 4's Front Row programme. 
 
 Things went wrong when Lawson started dissecting Crowe's accent in the movie. 
 
 He suggested there were 'hints' of Irish in the supposedly English accent. 
 
 Outburst: Hollywood star Russell Crowe walked out on a BBC Radio 4 interview after being riled by accusations he had made Robin Hood sound Irish 
 
 The 46-year-old New Zealandborn star, who lives in Australia, was having none of it. 
 
 'You've got dead ears, mate,' he said ominously. 
 
 'You've seriously got dead ears if you think that's an Irish accent.' 
 
 HOW THE TESTY EXCHANGE UNFOLDED Mark Lawson: 'The accent that you've given him, there are hints to me of Irish, but what... were you thinking in those terms?' Russell Crowe: 'You've got dead ears mate, you've seriously got dead ears, if you think that's an Irish accent.' 
 
 Lawson: 'Hints of, I thought...' 
 
 Crowe (interrupting): 'B*******.' (Crowe then talks about his portrayal of Robin Hood before coming back to the accent issue) 
 
 Crowe: 'I'm a little dumbfounded you could possibly find any Irish in that character, that's kind of ridiculous anyway, but it's your show.' 
 
 Lawson: 'So you're... well, I am just asking... so you're going for northern English?' 
 
 Crowe: 'No, I was going for an Italian, yeah, missed it? (Laughs) F*** me! (The actor then refuses to answer a question about whether he had not wanted to deliver some of his most famous lines in Gladiator) 
 
 Crowe: 'I don't get the Irish thing by the way. I don't get it at all.' (He finishes the interview, waving his cigarette and walking out). Crowe went on to talk about the character but the accusation had clearly hit a raw nerve. 'I'm a little dumbfounded that you could possibly find any Irish in that character - that's kind of ridiculous, but it's your show,' he said. Lawson, who was interviewing Crowe at the Dorchester Hotel in London, did his best to smooth things over. But there was no turning back. 
 
 Crowe then refused to answer questions about whether he had not wanted to deliver some of his most famous lines in the blockbuster Gladiator. He is said to have then waved his cigarette and walked off. Voice coaches working on Robin Hood, which like Gladiator-was directed by Ridley Scott, have said they wanted their hero to have an accent closer to the natives of Rutland, which is south east of Nottingham in the East Midlands. But one critic has claimed Crowe's accent 'sounds like an Australian doing an impression of Jim Bowen off Bullseye', while another suggested he had 15 different accents. Last week, Crowe revealed how he had worked on his English accent by listening to tapes of Michael Parkinson. 
 
 'If you look at the early ballads about Robin Hood he's connected to Barnsdale and historians argue Yorkshire and Nottingham are the two places he could have come from,' he said. 
 
 'So yes, I listened to a lot of Parky - that was a great help.' Crowe's bad temper has led to a number of run-ins over the years. 
 
 In 2005, he was charged with second-degree assault after throwing a telephone at a worker at the Mercer Hotel in New York. ||||| Critic's Rating: 2 1/2 stars 
 
 Journal Sentinel TV and film critic Duane Dudek looks at life on the small and big screen, and some of the cool stuff on both. 
 
 There have been more films about Robin Hood than arrows in a quiver. 
 
 The earliest, with Douglas Fairbanks is almost 90 years old; the definitive version, with Errol Flynn, is more than 70 years old; and Sean Connery, Kevin Costner and Disney have all taken a whack at the myth. 
 
 And if you've seen any of these - or "Braveheart," "Rob Roy," "The Patriot" or "Gladiator," for that matter - then you've seen the new version by director Ridley Scott with Russell Crowe, a torpid action movie about land reform with the exhausted quality of material so thin you can see right through it. 
 
 It is not your father's, or your grandfather's, "Robin Hood"; it just acts like it is. As a prequel, it throws a new coat of paint on a familiar legend, but its revisionism feels like artifice and contrivance. 
 
 The backstory, about the Crusades, Robin's tortured personal life and how he met the fair MaidMarian is a burdensome and dirge-like overture to a 140-minute-long tale in which both the journey and the destination are predetermined. 
 
 Scott - working from a screenplay by Brian Helgeland, the Oscar-winning writer of "L.A. Confidential" and of the medieval fantasy "A Knight's Tale" - sets this prefabrication on an impressively tactile, live-action foundation. Costumes, locations and other inanimate affectations add a verisimilitude that makes the digital effects in "Iron Man 2" look like the cartoons they are. 
 
 But "Robin Hood" is less old-school than prehistoric, a primer in genre boilerplate, period generalizations and action-film set pieces. 
 
 Crowe's title character is an archer on his way home from the Crusades who, aping the legend of Martin Guerre, assumes the identity of a dead knight; falls in love with the man's widow, played by a dignified and unadorned Cate Blanchett; stumbles onto a plot by the French to invade England; and organizes an army of noblemen and peasants with various grievances against their foolish and duplicitous king to fight against them. 
 
 And he is helped throughout by eccentric and bawdy sidekicks who will become his merry band of guerillas. 
 
 There are even scenes where he robs from the rich, Blanchett is harassed by the evil sheriff of Nottingham and Crowe rides into battle in slow motion. 
 
 And, as with most pre-Industrial Revolution mechanical devices, you can see all these gears turning slowly before your eyes. 
 
 Although moon-faced Crowe is still agile a decade after he and Scott collaborated on "Gladiator," he never seems emotionally engaged here. Whether propped on a horse or plopped into a scene, he has the detached quality of someone doing his job because it's his job. 
 
 As a result, his character never feels completely integrated into the dense and convoluted story that bears his name. 
 
 Robin Hood ** 1/2 
 
 Cast: Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett, Max von Sydow, William Hurt, Mark Strong, Oscar Isaac, Danny Huston, Eileen Atkins, Mark Addy, Kevin Durand, Scott Grimes, Matthew Macfadyen 
 
 Behind the scenes: Produced by Ridley Scott, Brian Grazer and Russell Crowe. Written by Brian Helgeland. Directed by Ridley Scott. 
 
 Rated: PG-13; violence, warfare, sexual innuendo 
 
 Approximate running time: 140 minutes 
 
 E-mail: ddudek@journalsentinel.com ||||| Cannes Film Festival Review: “Robin Hood” 
 
 Photo copyright © Universal Pictures 
 
 A conjectural “origins” story about the career birth of England’s legendary people’s outlaw, Ridley Scott’s “Robin Hood” is neither as good as the director’s personal best period epic, “Gladiator,” nor a match for Hollywood’s most memorable previous accounts of the beneficent bandit of Sherwood Forest (it is, however, superior to the Kevin Costner entry two decades back, which I at the time dubbed “Robin of Wood”). Earthy, rugged and earnestly advanced in quasi-plausible historical terms, this grandly produced picture can be regarded as something of a tangential sequel to Scott’s ambitious “Kingdom of Heaven,” with Richard the Lionheart as the connective thread. After several pictures dedicated to documenting his increasing girth, it’s reassuring to see Russell Crowe back in fighting form, but the villains here chart new territory in one-dimensionality, the essential storyline is bereft of surprise and the picture ends where most Robin Hood tales—sensibly, as it turns out—begin. 
 
 In the context of the film’s launch as the opening night attraction at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, it’s amusing that the yarn’s greatest villains are the French, under King Philip II; to counter them, the assorted warring English factions are compelled to unite, a theme with contemporary resonance of its own in the wake of the recent fractious election in the U.K. 
 
 With opening titles incorrectly stating that the action commences at the beginning of the 12th century when, in fact, King Richard died in 1199, on the eve of the 13th, the film shows English soldiers in the final stages of retreat from the Third Crusade. Having materialized at the very end of “Kingdom of Heaven,” Richard (a grandly shaggy Danny Huston) lays successful seige to a French castle on his way back to England for the first time in a decade, only to be killed by a (historically correct) arrow through the neck. 
 
 With the troops in disarray, a few of the king’s best archers, including Crowe’s Robin Longstride, witness a forest ambush led by Godfrey (Mark Strong, as if portraying a direct ancestor of his perfidious gangster in “Kick-Ass”). At stake, literally if not officially, is the English crown, which Robin scoops up and stealthily spirits across the Channel to return it to Richard’s beleaguered mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine (Eileen Atkins). The spectacle of Robin’s boat proceeding up the Thames estuary on its way to the Tower of London, accompanied by an increasing number of escorts, makes for a fresh and impressive sequence, the pageantry leavened by the fact that Robin is an imposter, masquerading as Sir Robert Loxley, a former-comrade-in-arms whose dying wish was that Robin return his sword to his father in Nottingham. 
 
 What Sir Robert failed to mention, however, was that he also had a wife, a feisty lass named Marion (not a Maid this time, thank you very much) who has spent the decade tolerating local louts while tending to her blind, dear and very old dad-in-law, Sir Walter Loxley (Max von Sydow). 
 
 As written by Brian Helgeland from a story cooked up by him and the “Kung Fu Panda” team of Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris, the film’s first 45 minutes and much thereafter are narrowly devoted to establishing myriad deadly oppositions; this is a world with no shortage of vendettas, grudges and plain old hatreds. John, the arrogant, insecure and youngest of Eleanor’s sons and now the new king, dismisses the longtime royal adviser William Marshall (William Hurt) and is persuaded by the venal Godfrey to soak the already strapped northern barons for everything they’re worth; Godfrey takes it upon himself to eliminate Marshall and Robin, especially after the latter bestows him with an unsightly scar that extends his mouth by a couple of inches; Eleanor loathes the French tart Isabella (Lea Seydoux) who will become John’s queen, and Robin, his memory gradually reawakened to a convulsive childhood trauma, realizes who was responsible for depriving him of his father. 
 
 Other than from the occasional roaring fireplace, the only warmth in this cold and distinctly unmerry olde England comes from the bonds that grow, first, between Robin and Sir Walter, who quickly embraces the new arrival as a surrogate son, then between Robin and Cate Blanchett’s Marion, here reconceived as a self-sufficient woman and nascent warrior very much along modern lines. Even though there are no better actors one could imagine for either of these roles, the predictably programmed progress of the relationship prevents even Crowe and Blanchett from doing a whole lot with it; the underplayed romance is presented as a gradual, inevitable thaw rather than a lightning bolt of passion, but while this feels plausible between two wary, fortyish survivors, it’s not very dramatic or emotionally engaging. 
 
 One half-hearted, incidental sequence featuring Robin and his three barely identified, much less characterized crusader mates, on a larky escapade dispatching some bad guys in the forest is enough to demonstrate that Scott would scarcely have been the right director to pull off a high-spirited, old-fashioned romp in the style of Michael Curtiz’s and William Keighley’s immortal “The Adventures of Robin Hood” with Errol Flynn. 
 
 But, the dramatic sobreity and historical consciousness with which the director approaches this new take is knee-capped by the sort of broadstroke villainy and motivational simplicity more suitable for a straightforward audience pleaser of yore. The extreme punishment Godfrey and his crew mete out on ordinary citizens in the latter stretch seem wholly gratuitous and off-puttingly bring the film down to the level of violence for violence’s sake. 
 
 Matters pick up a bit thanks to the spectacular logistics of the climactic battle; with Godfrey’s men poised on a Channel beach to welcome the French fleet as it arrives to invade England, Robin, the barons and a dithering King John surprise them on the high cliffs above, from which the archers rain down a torrrent of arrows before mounted troops engage the enemy on the sand and in the water. The history-minded will enjoy the wit of a subsequent scene which is consciously set up to suggest the signing of the Magna Carta. 
 
 Still, what we’re left with is a fashionably gritty period drama, conceived by intelligent minds and handsomely decked out, but featuring no beating heart or compelling raison d’etre. The very ending, a sort of cliffhanger followed by the title, “And so the legend begins,” makes you want to see something other than the movie you’ve just seen. The problem is that this “Robin Hood” is unlikely to spawn a sequel, so unless Scott has already filmed a secret follow-up, as Richard Lester did with “The Three Musketeers,” this legend will simply have to be imagined. 
 
 A small afterthought: Does Ridley Scott have something against Peter O’Toole? This is the second Scott film in which there is an important role that all but cries out for O’Toole to play it. Richard Harris was okay as Marcus Aurelius in “Gladiator” but there can be little doubt O’Toole would have been sensational. I am second to none in my esteem for Max von Sydow; his name in a cast always increases my desire to see a film. But good as he is here, I still wished I’d been seeing the rascally Irishman as the 84-year-old patriarch who warms up over the course of a long evening with the help of abundant conversation water. 
 
 Get the latest updates via Twitter. 
 
 Well written review but I have to disagree with Gladiator being Ridley Scott’s best epic. Russell Crowe MADE it a good film. My choice would easily be Kingdom of Heaven which not only focused on breathtaking set peices and action but a complex (if fictional) story of religion and politics. 
 
 Saw Robin Hood last night and was utterly bored, and shocked at the dreadful story line, the badly casted performances. 
 
 Very disappointed in Russel Crowe, till up to now was some actor I admired, but this was for him an embarassed. Stick to acting and not producing. All action and no contents! 
 
 The film is a disaster. I have an earlier version of Brian Helgeland’s script which is one of the best I’ve ever read. Unfortunately there were too many people getting involved later on. Could have been awesome, that’s what’s really sad about the whole thing. Excellent review thou! 
 
 <a >Watch Robin Hood Movie</a> as this movie will surely hit theaters. I do really like the concept and the production of this movie. 
 
 Great review Todd. But you seem way too good for IndieWire. It’s like an esteemed professor giving a colossal lecture on some girl’s Facebook wall. 
 
 Todd is back, doing what he does best—saving us movie ticket $$!!! 
 
 Thanks! 
 
 “violence for violence’s sake” says it all for me. It’s an unnecessary tactic to get you to cheer on the hero. 
 
 ARN’T WE HI-TECK? 
 
 Mr. McCarthy, so glad you’re back. 
 
 I agree with Stefan V - good review, and I’m disappointed. On top of that TCM was nice enough to re-run Lion in Winter, w/ O’Toole and Hepburn, and Flynn’s Adventures of Robin Hood and more over the weekend. Robert Osborne not only provided historical accounts of the movies and how they were made, but he accurately provided the context of the times. He actually knew where we were starting was around 1182. 
 
 I have loved this mythical story all my life, even watching the TV version as a kid, so I was really looking forward to this. But as I saw the preview, heard Cate B., when asked if there was a romance, say “well it’s an adventure,” which to me means she’s a prop, and heard Crowe repeatedly talk about how accurate their depiction of fighting is - how they got their bow and arrow attacks just right - I thought “bomb is on the way.” 
 
 Russell - guess what? - if you blow the STORY - if the WRITING is not there - your movie won’t work despite how you hold your bow!! 
 
 And I agree about von Sydow (who I totally respect) vs. O’Toole. O’Toole is pure genious. Go watch Lion in Winter! 
 
 Todd: Thanks for the great review! I will be looking forward to your future reviews and would love it if you could report on how Scott’s Robin Hood goes over in Cannes. 
 
 Hoped it would be along the Kingdom of Heaven Directors Cut, by far the best of Ridley Scotts sands epics. 
 
 Oh well. Now we can concentrate on Alien! 
 
 Todd, Ridley Scott’s best epic is actually the director’s cut of Kingdom of Heaven. 
 
 So far, seems like the critics embargo drama casting… 
 
 Dan Jolin of Empire Magazine as Robbin the Hood 
 
 Drew McWeeny as the Sheriff of NotOnMyWatch 
 
 Anne Thompson as Maid CarryOn 
 
 is more entertaining than the film itself. 
 
 The embargo was broken by Empire Magazine, followed by THR and Variety. indieWIRE has the same embargo as the trades. 
 
 So this film isn’t Merrie Old England enough ,it needs more of what drove the Adventures of Robin Hood ,72 years ago? Comparing and contrasting films of the past with new presentations is what a lot of film reviewers do best. I’m sure there are advocates for the silent Ben-Hur over the 1959 Ben-Hur .This Hollywood makes a lot of frothy fantasy driven ,CGI films for summer consumption.I do believe this Hollywood is arguing for yet another fantasy film, Lots of CGI vIdeo game looking action,some hot babes. Yes ,I can see Robin as a secret wizard with the power of flight..etc; etc; 
 
 Aren’t you supposed to be under an embargo for this? 
 
 Thank god you’re back. Great review,. 
 
 I liked this review, and I’m disappointed that Scott settled for simple ‘black-and-white’ portrayals of the characters. Could have been a must-see. 
 
 Thanks for the review! 
 
 What a joy! Beautiful review! And epic in length compared to Variety. Can’t wait for more Cannes stuff. 
 
 Post a Comment
– He didn't throw anything, but Russell Crowe is making headlines again for his temper. The Robin Hood star walked out on a BBC interviewer who pushed him a bit too far with questions about the legendary outlaw's accent—and some stale gossip about Gladiator. "Front Row" host Mark Lawson said he detected some Irish in the accent the native New Zealander adopted for Robin Hood, and Crowe responded, "Bollocks," reports the Daily Mail. The interview proceeded, and Crowe eventually returned to the matter of the accent, saying, "I'm a little dumbfounded you could possibly find any Irish in that character—that's kind of ridiculous, but it's your show." He was a lot less forgiving when Lawson brought up a recent book that claims Crowe didn't want to do the climactic scene in Gladiator—the actor got up and left. Listen to the interview here; it gets contentious at around 5:50 and ends shortly after the 10-minute mark.