Word: costner
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...Kevin Costner is a big star. He dances with wolves, he fields his dreams, he plays Robin Hood in a California accent, and lines form outside the local plex that are longer than the queue of creditors at an S&L. Star quality: people want to watch him on the big screen. Star power: tens of millions of people will pay for the privilege. And keep on paying. His western smash, Dances with Wolves, has been filling theaters for nine months now. Last week more folks went to see it than Return to the Blue Lagoon, which...
...million from outside investors. "If studio executives lost 25% of their own money on a film," he says, "they'd make better movies." Robinson spent only 20 hours considering whether to buy the Robin Hood script for $1.2 million, and even less time deciding whether to hire Kevin Costner to play the lead for $7.5 million. Deriding some studio executives as dithering bureaucrats, he declares, "I'm never going to have to ask some guy who makes $250,000 a year if I can make a film...
...Costner's larger, busier take on the legend, the only green power is at the box office. With a sigh, the script reprises Robin's recruiting of his Merry Men (a pallid crowd here), his verbal jousting (uninspired), his romance with Maid Marian (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, her wondrous screen potential again untapped). The movie treats these plot points as tiresome requirements, not chances to work fresh alchemy on old elements. At 2 hours 20 minutes, the enterprise lacks passion, or even a sense of inspired fun; it is as if the filmmakers were dutifully honoring business commitments. Wading through...
These performers are British; they were steeped from birth in high style and the seductive melody of theatrical rhetoric. But the leads -- Costner, Mastrantonio, Christian Slater as Will Scarlet, Micheal McShane as Friar Tuck, Morgan Freeman as a Moor displaced in Nottingham -- are all American, intoning flat varieties of American English. They sound like tourists stranded in Sherwood Forest. And they inadvertently give a new meaning to the story: now Robin and his band are vagrant colonials who save England from those who can actually speak the language...
Dull speaking, in Costner's case, is an emblem of miscasting. The character of Robin Hood demands emotional exuberance -- not Costner's forte. He does not spring; he is coiled. He is a reactive actor; audiences enjoy watching him think. In Bull Durham, Field of Dreams and Dances with Wolves he played, quite persuasively, cynics who find something to believe in. But Nottinghamshire is no place for California dreamin'. Perhaps, in the two recent movies about legendary princes, the stars should have swapped roles. Mel Gibson could have been a dashing Robin Hood and Costner a provocative Hamlet...