Hmm. Hmmmmm.
The first in the sea of Robin Hood movies that are on the way, Otto Bathurst’s Robin Hood, starring Kingsman’s Taron Egerton, has dropped its first trailer. And honestly, for all the changes to the setting and style you’d usually expect, the biggest concern we have is that… for a guy known for using a bow and arrow, he seems like he sucks at it?
Seriously, there is a lot of weirdness in this trailer, which sees Robin (Egerton) transplanted to the Crusades as he incites rebellion and robs from the rich to give to the poor — that he, I guess, is also kind of in the process of invading? — by night, while professing to hunt down the masked rogue by day. There’s a lot going on here.
The mix of technologies on display makes it hard to pinpoint if this is meant to lean more towards a more fantastical re-imagining of the Crusades or a “serious” view of the time period, but that’s honestly the least of this movie’s problems when the vast majority of the bow action in this trailer — you know, Robin Hood’s thing — just looks so off.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly last year, Jamie Foxx (who plays Moorish commander Little John, who teaches Robin the way of the bow in what basically looks like Oliver Queen’s cave from early seasons of Arrow, just without the salmon ladder) described the bow-action in the film as thus:
We’re shooting with our bows, but they computer-generated it so it’s rapid-fire, almost like an AK.
Oh. Yeah. That would explain why it looks so weird in this trailer! Which, like I said, when the actual act of firing a bow is literally one of the main things people know about Robin Hood, it’s probably not a great thing for the movie. We’ll have to wait and see in the coming months if this is just a dodgy first look.
Robin Hood, which also stars Ben Mendelsohn as the Sherrif of Nottingham, and Jamie Dornan as Will Scarlet, hits theatres November 21.