YMMV / Robin Hood (2018)

• Angst? What Angst?: Friar Tuck gets defrocked and in the aftermath, he claims to be grateful to Robin for "setting him free." This clashes heavily with his shock and horror at the defrocking as well as his sincere devotion to his religion and practice in the first two acts of the film.
• Complete Monster: The Sheriff of Nottingham serves as The Heavy for the Cardinal in a conspiracy to overthrow the king and rule England through the Church. The Sheriff uses his power to force men into fighting The Crusades, then seizes all of their belongings, including Robin of Locksley's manor. He also taxes the citizens of Nottingham, saying they are donations for the war effort, only to use it to fuel his greed. He forces many of the citizens to work and pay their debts in the mines, where they starve and die. After Robin Hood begins to steal and make a fool out of him, he brings in his Crusaders, led by the sadistic Gisbourne, and has him burn the mines to try and find Robin and has his mentor and friend John captured and tortured, at which point he mocks his dead son. When Robin surrenders to save more lives, the Sheriff threatens to drown Robin in his own piss and have his Love Interest Marian sent to Arabia to be raped over and over again, and when John is about to hang him, the Sheriff pathetically begs for his life. A cruel, greedy and utterly depraved sociopath, The Sheriff of Nottingham in this film is one of the most twisted versions of the character to date.
• Critical Dissonance: While the film was panned by critics, with a 13% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, audiences were more mixed (56% on RT, 5.3 on IMDb).
• Narm:
  • The slow-motion during the fight scenes looks fairly impressive... right up until you see Taron Egerton making some of the silliest faces imaginable.
  • You're supposed to take the scenes during Robin's time in the Crusades seriously. Good luck with that while you're busy wondering why the Crusader soldiers are wearing medieval versions of flak vests, why everyone, Crusaders and Saracens/Moors alike, is pretending their bows and arrows are rifles (including why everyone is mainly using bows and arrows, for that matter), why a dart-throwing ballista is treated like a rapid-fire mounted machine gun, why it's all about urban warfare and so there aren't any knights on horseback to be seen during the Crusades, and the fact that the Crusaders call in an air-strike via catapults launching boulders. Also the very on-the-nose allegory on the war on the Middle East. Dan Olson of Folding Ideas went so far as to call it "Zero Dark Loxley".
  • The main characters are easily identifiable by the fact that everybody else is covered in dirt.
• Narm Charm: As completely out of place as the costumes can be, some of them are fairly impressive and nice to look at. The fact that they're so out of place might even serve as some visual MS T3k Mantra for those willing. Likewise, the fight scenes (with bows and arrows clearly standing in for modern firearms—especially in the Crusades sequence—and the liberal use of parkour and bullet-time stunts) are thoroughly anachronistic, but are often more entertaining because of how eccentric and strange they are.
• Special Effects Failure: A fair few scenes are obviously the actors and/or props against a greenscreen.
• Spiritual Successor: A highly stylized re-imagining of a well-known English legend with intentional Anachronism Stew? Pretty much King Arthur: Legend of the Sword except with Robin Hood.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!: Much of the criticism thrown at the film is based on its recycling of The Dark Knight Trilogy and Arrow and redressing them as a Robin Hood movie. Robin's backstory and the Love Triangle between him, Marian, and Will Scarlet has been quite ridiculed for being a carbon copy of the triangle between Bruce Wayne, Rachel Dawes, and Harvey Dent, right down to Scarlet getting a Two-Face like burn scar in the end.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • The out of place costumes and Anachronism Stew was very commented about, with some critics noting the film was in an awkward middle stance by being so outrageously unrealistic yet at the same time taking itself too seriously and pretending that everything is indeed accurate to the time period it's taking place in. Many believed that a Robin Hood film in an updated modern setting, if not in a cyberpunk or post-apocalyptic setting like the movie sometimes feels as, would've been a way more interesting premise than what was actually produced.
  • There is definitely potential in using the story of Robin Hood to explore structural injustices in medieval society instead of just hinging it on whether there is a good or a bad ruler in place at the moment. This movie, however, squanders that potential by shoehorning in modern-day politics with war profiteering and conspiracies.
  • In spite of Gisborne being responsible for the death of his son, we never get an actual confrontation between he and John, and Gisborne is last seen unceremoniously knocked unconscious by Marian.
  • Friar Tuck's defrocking is very quickly shrugged off and he doesn't hold much ill will towards Robin for basically ruining his entire life. What should be an interesting examination of Robin Hood's escapades having major repercussions on both his intended targets and collateral innocents is glossed over because the movie doesn't seem to have time to dwell on this potential drama on the way to the climax.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Lampshaded briefly by Will towards the end after Robin reveals his identity to the people - this version of Robin doesn't become an outlaw until the very end of the film so for the majority of the time, he's a lord who by rights ought to be fully able to help the people the Sheriff has mistreated and driven from their homes. Instead, he spends the film using his lordly status to (on the outside) side with the Sheriff while his thief persona ("The Hood") doesn't so much leave plenty of money to individual people as drop handfuls of coins as he rides by for everyone to scramble for. Given all that, it's difficult to blame Will for interpreting Robin's Rousing Speech as just another example of a lord ordering his peasants about.
• WTH, Costuming Department?: Let's just say if you go into this film expecting any attempt at realistic 12th-century costuming, you'll be sorely disappointed. Highlights include: the Sheriff spending the movie in a Nazi-esque longcoat, soldiers wearing armour that's basically modern combat gear but with chainmail, Marian wearing a dress that wouldn't look out of place on a red carpet, and the poor of Nottingham generally looking like they've stepped straight out of a Cyberpunk clothing store.

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