Kevin Hood Prince of American crap movies Looks and feels like a low-budget tv movie.
So we have Kevin Costner, playing Robin Hood with an american accent. And Christian Slater playing Will Scarlet, also with an american accent. The rest of the cast, except the actual british actors, such as Alan Rickman and a few others, tries to mimick a british accent. Because most of the cast are american actors. Including Christian Slater who plays Robin's brother. I kid you not. Appaerently Costner, wasn't able to speak with a convincing british accent, so the director let him speak with an american accent. Imagine Nottingham, spoken with an american accent and you will cringe. And that pretty much set the standard for the rest of the film.
The movie feels cheap. The way its shot and filmed, it feels like a made for tv movie of the early 90'ies. Not a big action adventure feature film. There are no big action scenes. Or any big special effects. For a movie with a budget of 48 million dollars, it feels more like an 8 million dollars budget. The only cool effect is when a camera seems to be attached to all of "Robins" arrows as he shoots them.
Movies such as Aliens with a budget of only 18 million dollars and Robocop , only 13 million dollars look far bigger and far more expensive than this crap. Even a masterpiece like Tombstone only had a budget of 25 million dollars. And it looked like a 100 million dollar movie. It's a matter of creativity and make do with the budget you've been given. The director Kevin Reynolds has no creativity and no talent for making movies either. Im surprised they even bothered to shoot the movie in England. They could just as easily have shot it in Canada as there are no british landmarks seen anywhere.
Why this movie did so well at the box-office, especially when it was released the same year as Terminator 2, is beyond me.
The acting is awful. Especially from Costner who looks as bored as we do. At one point in the movie he is suppose to give this big speech to the peasants and his men, urging them to fight back against the sherif and his men. He pretty much looks like hes' just memorizing his lines. He is not even raising his voice. Ive seen better speeches in later movies. Of course Mel Gibsons iconic speech in the much superior Braveheart. And even Bill Pullmans awful patriotic, presidential speech in Independence Day is better acted. Not even the otherwise always great
Alan Rickman is convincing as the Sherif Nottingham. Which isn't surprising as he wasn't given much direction. He was pretty much given free reigns, so his scenes must be mostly improvisation.
Oh and Sean Connery shows up on a horse for about 30 seconds at the very end, playing Sir King Richard. An actor this big and good doing the smnallest cameo ever in a film. I hope he was paid well for this. Must have been a favor to Costner after Kevin and Sean acted together in the far superior The Untouchables.
The only good thing is that it didn't have a huge budget, like Waterworld 175 million dollars or The Postman that had a budget of 85 million dollars. Which was still a lot in 1997.
I advice you not to watch or rewatch Kevin Hood Prince of American crap movies. If you must watch a Robin Hood movie, watch The Adventures of Robin Hood. It's a very old movie, from 1938 but at least Errol Flynn did a good job at playing Robin Hood. And its true to the myth.