Watch The Killer–a classic by John Woo that influences tons of modern directors–and you’ll notice that the best parts are the quiet ones.
The tension of face-offs between the assassin and the detective, guns pointed, but no triggers pulled. The scenes with Jenny, the singer blinded by the assassin’s unintentional shot. And the moments where characters win by being clever instead of shooting things.
Because oh my precious baby Jesus, there is a lot of shooting.
Here’s the trailer with a good taste of this classic:
John Woo went on to direct a ton of other movies, including Face/Off, Broken Arrow, and Mission Impossible 2.
What stuck with me from The Killer is the big gun battles didn’t land like other scenes.
Whenever I saw a mountain of henchmen, dressed identically and holding guns, I knew they were dead. All of them. And this happened so many times in the movie (and most action films).
John Wick does a great job of making a small number of henchman menacing and real, and show the hero isn’t invincible.
There are a few main villains in The Killer, but they don’t get much screen time or development. They just live longer than the random henchmen.
There are far, far too many endings where the villain had the love interest with a gun to her head. The Killer does this, too.
Gunfights would seem to always be exciting, right? I don’t think so. When all kinds of people are shooting all kinds of bullets at the hero, you know they might get wounded, but the only deaths will be the generic extras.
Less is more. Make it one-on-one and you’ve got tension, like The Quick and the Dead, which does this so well again and again.
I can’t remember the last movie where an endless wave of henchmen made things tense or interesting. If you haven’t seen them before and don’t know their name, they are toast.
My pet theory is this: one-on-one fights are the best option for action movies, whenever possible: an even fight against an opponent with a shot at winning, whether it’s a quick-draw gunfight, a fist fight, or a sword fight. My favorite? Sword fights seem to always work, whether the duel is set long ago in a galaxy far away or in a children’s story that has no right to be so damned good.
Listen: I love cheesy action films and B movies of all types, as long as they don’t take themselves too seriously. Feed me summer popcorn flicks, meant to entertain, instead of pretentious nonsense.
ROBIN HOOD is meant to entertain.
It’s got a good lead actor (Taron Egerton, famous for THE KINGSMEN films), a solid sidekick (Jamie Foxx) and a great villain (Ben Mendelsohn from THE DARK KNIGHT RISES and ROGUE ONE)–plus a big budget ($100 million).
Add to that a built-in audience who loves the story and character of Robin Hood.
This is like chocolate chip cookies, right? Hard to go wrong with those ingredients. Everybody will like it.
Except this movie bombed at the box office. A dumpster fire.
Why did this film go so wrong, so fast?
Act 1 is a good start
There’s a lot to like in the first act. see Robin’s ordinary life and get a good introduction to Marian when she tries to steal Robin’s horse…and he lets her.
His life gets upended when he goes to war during the Crusades and comes back to find his estate confiscated by the Sheriff of Nottingham, who’s taxing everybody to death.
It’s an effective start, and the training sequences with John and Robin are great.
So how does the movie go sideways? I mean, this film makes Kevin Costner’s terrible British accent look like a minor problem in an epic masterpiece.
Why the middle turns meh
Act 2 gets confused. The scenes with the Sheriff of Nottingham are decent, letting him chew up some scenery.
Yet the middle gives us a Robin Hood movie that seems to switch time periods, as if the director wants to mash up medieval Crusades action with huddled masses working in Victorian factories and mines along with 21st century antifa protests.
There’s a big dinner where all the wealthy people show up, with women dressed in furs and high heels (I kid you not), and a giant CGI action sequence set up with horses and carriages that feels more Ben Hur than Robin Hood.
You CAN mix things up like this–A KNIGHT’S TALE with Heath Ledger threw in modern rock songs and other craziness, and it worked. The degree of difficulty is simply really, really high.
Basically, Act 2 is a hot mess.
How the climax isn’t climactic
And then we get to Act 3, where things truly go south.
The first rule of storytelling: save your best scenes for last.
There were great scenes in Act 1–the battles from the Crusades, the training montages with John–that simply eclipse anything offered in Act 3.
The Sheriff of Nottingham meets his end, and not at the hands of Robin, but John.
Taking his place as Sheriff is the romantic rival, the lover Marian took while Robin was believed to be dead. And hovering over everything as the Biggest Bad Guy of Them All is the cardinal, or the pope–I forget. Plus there’s a bad guy soldier, the same man who clashed with Robin during the Crusades, brought in as a mercenary to catch the Hood.
Confused? Yeah. Let’s count the bad guys: (1) O.G. Sheriff, (2) Hired Mercenary, (3) Corrupt Cardinal/Pope and (4) New Sheriff.
Here’s the deal. That’s four separate villains, and I can’t remember their actual names.
Fixing this movie
Hey, you don’t need Michael Bay explosions to have a tense, exciting movie. The ending of Michael Clayton is one of the best Act 3 climaxes in history, and there isn’t a gun, knife or explosion in sight. Just two people talking. No amount of CGI could improve this scene.
HOWEVER: If you’re making an action movie, you need action in the climax, and what we get in Act 3 is a let-down from what showed up on the screen in Act 1.
A bow and arrow is a great tool for Robin Hood, and fun when he uses it for heists and hijinks. Yet it’s a terrible weapon, as a storytelling device, for confronting the villain. Which should be singular. Give us one main villain.
Which leads me to the two simplest fixes for this movie: (1) combine the four villains into one capable, scary, tough Sheriff of Nottingham and (2) end with Robin fighting the Sheriff of Nottingham, one-on-one.
There’s a reason why the best movie fights tend to be bare-handed brawls or swordfights.
Swordfights are just great cinema, and that’s what I expected for the climax of ROBIN HOOD.
Think about THE PRINCESS BRIDE and every STAR WARS movie ever made: the duels with swords or lightsabers are beautiful and essential to the stories. Edit those out and they’d really hurt.
So I’ll leave you with the kind of thing ROBIN HOOD should have put into Act 3: a long, evenly matched duel.
The Red Pen of Doom 