Movie Review: Tristan & Isolde

Way back in 1991, when there was a Bush in the White House and we were at war with Iraq, two competing Robin Hood movies made their respective debuts. In this corner we had Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, starring Kevin Costner as the guy in tights, Morgan Freeman as his anachronistic Moorish sidekick and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as Maid Marion. In that corner we had a little-noticed British film called simply Robin Hood, which was shown theatrically in the U.K. but only on television in the U.S., and which starred career B-movie actor Patrick Bergin and a young Uma Thurman. Reynolds’s version was a ridiculously overwrought star vehicle, one of the most laugh-out-loud clunkers of the 1990’s, with a script written by a couple of hack producers that can charitably be described as awful, and copious scenes of Costner swaggering around like John Wayne in The Conqueror. That Costner’s film was a box office hit tells us that today’s movie audiences haven’t gotten any dumber.

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