Favorite Movie Music: Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves

No, it wasn't a very good movie. I'm not even going to try to pretend that it was. It sucked, in fact. Why? Why was 1991's Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves such a quiverful of suck? Well, there were a couple of reasons. Kevin Costner's haircut, for one. Funny, I had not been aware they had conditioner and blow-dryers in 11th century England. Costner looks like he should be carrying a surfboard, not a longbow. I mean, seriously. I'm glad we live in an era now when actors in Medieval period films actually have greasy, unwashed hair.

Another reason: Kevin Costner's accent. Please, Hollywood, stop making Americans do that silly, generic, poncy English voice when they're playing British parts. Even the otherwise awesome Peter Dinklage is at times guilty of this in Game of Thrones. The thing about British accents is, they're very specific. Very, very specific, to both the region you're from and the socioeconomic class you were born into. Clipping your vowels and vaguely lilting your voice just doesn't cut it. Give these actors a few weeks of voice coaching, please.

Other crappy things about the movie? It has the great Alan Rickman, camping it up as the villainous Sheriff of Nottingham, and somehow manages to make him neither scary nor funny. This is the first and only movie to accomplish this. Oh yeah, and then there's the character of Marian, played (as gamely as possible, to her credit) by Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. The first time Robin Hood encounters her, Marian is dressed as an assassin, for some unexplained reason, and nearly kicks his ass in a brutal bout of hand-to-hand combat, before pulling her hood off, a moment when we're all supposed to go, "Oh wow, it's a woman!!!" But here's the thing: From that point forward, she never displays this apparent mastery of fighting skill again, and nobody ever comments on it. She's just a normal damsel-in-distress type. And how, exactly, did a highborn woman receive such advanced combat training that she's able to beat a hardened veteran soldier from the Crusades to a standstill? It's never explained. They just threw that scene in because they figured it would be awesome. Yeah, awesomely LAME.

All right, enough ranting. It's a terrible movie, if you haven't seen it you're lucky, don't bother, and yeah, OK, Morgan Freeman was pretty good in it — as was Michael Wincott as Nottingham's evil henchman Guy of Gisbourne, who unlike Alan Rickman actually is terrifyingly creepy in this film. My real point, though, is: The theme song is awesome. Really great. (And no, I'm not talking about the cheesy Bryan Adams love song that became a top 40 hit that year.) The score was composed by Michael Kamen, who has a long list of movie music to his credit, and really, he got this one right: It's just everything you want in a theme song for a movie about Robin Hood. Like much of John Williams' work, the music seems to have been written for a better film than it actually got. I'd like to make the picture that deserves this theme song. You get the idea.

Even if you've never seen Prince of Thieves, you may be familiar with the overture: It has been resurrected lately as background music for those "I love movies, in general!" montages that often play at the beginnings of rental DVDs these days: You know, the ones that you can't skip through, that show clips from Casablanca juxtaposed with Lethal Weapon III for no apparent reason.