As he did with director Scott in Gladiator, Crowe leavens his ferocity with a sideways wink, his serious brutishness with a charmer's smile, in what is, essentially, an origins story - how Robin and His Merry Band came to be Sherwood's fabled outlaws.
In one scene, Crowe, Cate Blanchett, and Max von Sydow stand in the cavernous hearth room of a Nottingham castle. While the dialogue is thick with talk of bonds between fathers and sons, of broken promises between kings and commoners, all you can really think of is how cool is this: the two Australians and the stentorian Swede alchemizing some actorly magic.
Blanchett, of course, is Marion. Marion of Loxley, wife to a knight who's off fighting with Richard. She's left behind to watch as her horses and her harvests are plundered by a gang of renegade orphans in spooky masks. (The images of these nearly naked guerrilla fighters running wild through the woods have a primal, pagan beauty about them.) Von Sydow is her blind and bowed old father-in-law, Sir Walter.
When Robin comes knocking at the castle door, bearing the sword of Sir Robert Loxley - and bearing the news of his death in the Crusades - the father and the wife shudder with grief, and then get on with a wily masquerade: Robin will pretend to be Robert. He will share the lady's chamber (but not her bed) and call Sir Walter his dad, in order to calm the troubled village folk and maintain what stability is left in the Loxley domain.
It's a ruse that Marion first bristles at - you can see her "I will sever your manhood" caution in the Robin Hood trailer - but he being Robin (and Crowe) and she being a woman who has not seen a husband in many a year, love between these two is not hard to imagine.
As long as villainy doth not impede.
