Ridley Scott's Russell Crowe Trilogy
Robin Hood. Image courtesy of Univesal Pictures.
From 2007 to 2010 Ridley Scott made precisely three films with two different studios featuring one actor in all three of them. 2007’s American Gangster, a fine but not particularly noteworthy crime biopic starring Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington. 2008’s Body of Lies, a fine but not particularly noteworthy spy thriller about the US and the Middle East starring Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio. And 2010’s Robin Hood, a fine but not particularly noteworthy epic about the prince of thieves starring Russell Crowe and a bunch of merry men.
The thing that all of these films have in common, aside from Russell Crowe, is that they are fine films, competently made, but they are somewhat uninspired. When you compare this stretch of Ridley Scott’s career to the kind of visionary masterworks that preceded it - Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator, Black Hawk Down, Thelma & Louise - it just seems kind of small in comparison. None of these are bad films, but they aren’t particularly ambitious either. I suppose Robin Hood was an attempt to re-imagine a classic historical epic in a grittier way but it lacks the sweep of even Kingdom of Heaven (the director’s cut).
As Roger Ebert put it: “Robin Hood is a high-tech and well made violent action picture using the name of Robin Hood for no better reason than that it's an established brand not protected by copyright.” Man that guy started getting crotchety toward the end. But, I think that does more or less describes this period in Ridley Scott’s filmography. American Gangster, Body of Lies and Robin Hood are all well made (and violent) but they are fairly rote, journeyman type fare that almost feel mailed in.
Where’s the ambition, the grand sweeping stabs at the meaning of life and society? Where’s the immaculate world-building, or the subversive feminism? There’s really none of that, and what’s more these films aren’t even really aspiring to go near those things. They are content to be solidly middling genre fare with a workhorse actor who at that point in time could still carry a film. They want to be competent but not transcendent. And that is of course fine. It is difficult to make even one good film, let alone three, and the fact that a sucker like me is lamenting that they weren’t better merely speaks to the sky high expectations Ridley Scott’s own career has set for himself.
But you can sort of feel in this stretch that the passion had gone out of the thing. Scott wasn’t necessarily making these films for himself or because they thrilled or excited him. At least, I don’t think so anyway (I cannot speak for the man, as I do not know his inner thoughts). Perhaps he made them, like Christopher Nolan, to satisfy the studio gods and accrue enough goodwill and financial returns so that he could get down the real business of making his next true passion project: a batshit crazy return to the Alien franchise.
