May this movie rest in peace.
The Last of Robin Hood
Grade: C
Director: Richard Glatzer (Quinceanera), Wash Westmoreland (The Fluffer)
Screenplay: Glatzer, Westmoreland
Cast: Kevin Kline (Last Vegas), Dakota Fanning (The Secret Lives of Bees)
Rating: R
Runtime: 94 min.
by John DeSando
“In like Flynn,” a colloquial expression based on the dissolute life of Errol Flynn.
Because Kevin Kline looks like an aging Errol Flynn (he died at 50), it’s easy to believe Kline’s depiction of the swashbuckling roué from early 20th Century American film in The Last of Robin Hood. Yet, if you want really to experience the bad boy who gave Robin life, read his autobiography, My Wicked, Wicked Ways. Sadly this film is a dull, soporific take on the last years of Flynn.
Not that Kevin Kline doesn’t have the ability to be roguish like Flynn, it’s just that he appears to have been directed to underplay the famous rake, a letdown for those of us hoping to experience the wild wicked one. Instead, this Flynn is pursuing a much younger woman, Beverly Aadland (Dakota Fanning), with a feeling of entitlement and an ennui-subtle sense of “been there.”
More interesting than the moribund Flynn is Beverly’s mom, Florence (Susan Sarandon) -- a stage mom if there ever was one. Her machinations to get her daughter into films are almost unbelievable. When she realizes her underage daughter is sleeping with Flynn, the other side of her ambition, the love of a mother, rings true as a contrast. However, she allows the affair.
To their credit, Fanning and Kline seem to care about each other to the extent that any moral outrage about statutory rape is slightly mitigated. Although the script doesn’t allow for the dramatic energy that should accompany his shenanigans, brightening the dim movie is Sarandon’s ambitious mom with dorky glasses and fat—she steals whatever show there is to take.
So if you want to witness the quiet decline of a glamorous pedophile, the coda to Flynn’s checkered life is gently carried out by Kevin Kline as if in hospice. It’s the last of an outrageous actor. R.I.P.
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.rr.com
