Tight Tights

As I went through a bunch of comedy films recently, most of them only affirmed a simple truth: comedy is hard. A lot of films have come out that purport to be comedies, but going back and watching them (sometimes again, sometimes for the first time), I struggled to figure out why certain comedies took off and others didn’t. There were some bad movies that I thought were at least mildly amusing (like Hot Tub Time Machine 2) and other films that were massive hits back in the day but I thought were awful, even offensively bad (like Scary Movie). It takes someone smart, and wickedly funny, to be able to make a truly great comedy, and even then they didn’t always hit it right, (such as the ZAZ team failing pretty hard with The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!, in my opinion).

Mel Brooks is a writer / director who is generally considered to have created some of the greatest parody comedies around. He had a string of solid hits in the 1970s before hitting a bit of a rough patch in the 1980s. History of the World, Part I had a larger budget than Brooks had worked with before, but the returns on the film weren’t great. Spaceballs (as beloved as it is now) similarly failed to deliver. Brooks needed a win, and it was hard to know if the comedy legend still had it in him to create some of the best parodies around.

In some ways, Robin Hood: Men in Tights delivered the hit Brooks needed. It was a modest success at the Box Office, pulling in $72 Mil against its $20 Mil budget. It did this, in part, by capitalizing on the good will the Robin Hood property was seeing from 1991’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. That film came out and Brooks set to work parodying the movie, not only directly but also by tapping into his love for the old Errol Flynn swashbucklers. Combined together he created a very silly, at times quite amusing, little Robin Hood film, one that is still mostly watchable even thirty years later.

The film follows the basic beats of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves for its overall plot. Robin of Locksley (Cary Elwes) was fighting in the Crusades when he was captured and imprisoned in Jerusalem. While in the dungeon he meets Asneeze (Issac Hayes), a local warrior, and the two plot a quick escape. Asneeze tells Robin that when the man gets back to England he should look for Asneeze’s son, Achoo (Dave Chapelle), and likely the younger man would aid Robin in anything he needed.

Robin does make it back to England and, soon after, saves Achoo from a beating at the hands of the goons of the Sheriff of Nottingham (Roger Rees). It seems that the sheriff has been enforcing the awful, harsh, and totally unfair taxes of Prince John (Richard Lewis), beating the people of England down until they can’t take anything more. The sheriff even has Locksley Castle impounded and towed for unpaid back taxes. This leads Robin, Achoo, and the friends they make along the way to take to the highwayman life, stealing from the rich to give to… someone, all so they can make the Prince and the Sheriff look bad. It’s up to Robin to fight back tyranny and save the day… and if he has a little time for love, in the form of Maid Marian (Amy Yasbeck), well, all the better.

As I’ve noted before, a good parody not only needs solid jokes but also some form it can hang those on. In fact, it’s generally easier to find good jokes if you have a solid storytelling foundation to work from. That’s why a lot of parodies (even Brooks’s own) tend to take an existing property and then rework it into a humorous version with a similar story. ZAZ did this with Airplane!, Brooks did it with Spaceballs, and he did it again here in Robin Hood: Men in Tights.

The film is a shameless copy of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, just with a few details changed and a lot of humor added all so Brooks couldn’t get sued for plagiarism. From the opening act to the last battle between the Sheriff and Robin, you know that you’re watching a copy of that other, dramatic film starring Kevin Costner, and that’s fine. It was an overly long, self-serious film that didn’t understand how silly it was. It was ripe for parody and if Brooks hadn’t done it you know someone else would have eventually.

It helps that Brooks was operating at a high bar this time around. While not all of his films were winners (History of the World, Part 1 is funny in places but very flabby in others, while Dracula: Dead and Loving It is all flab) has enough good jokes and solid scenes that you can forgive the comedy bits that don’t land since something else funnier will be coming along soon. The film will vary wildly from absurdist humor (like a castle being towed away) to sly action bits (the quarterstaff battle on a bridge is one of my favorite scenes) to then musical numbers, all without missing a beat. These bits are great, hustled along by an incredibly game Cary Elwes.

I would legitimately call Elwes the piece of the puzzle that brings it all together. The star, who had starred in The Princess Bride six years earlier, has that perfect swashbuckling charm and natural charisma that makes his Robin fun to watch. Beyond that, though, it looks like Elwes had the best time making this film. He goes from scene to scene with a big smile on his face, loving every silly minute of what he’s doing. From the absurdist moments to swashbuckling action, Elwes never loses sight of the fun. Plus, of course, he had that sword fighting training for The Princess Bride which means his combat scenes actually look legitimately good. His casting in the film was perfect, and it makes the movie.

All that said the film struggles when it tries to make then-current pop culture jokes. Gags from old shows (“hey, Abbot!”), jokes about old memes (like “a mime is a terrible thing to waste”), and props that are no longer fresh (like the Reebok Pump) all give the film a somewhat dated feel. Plenty of the gags and jokes outside this do land, but there’s no doubt that the less timely material is certainly the least funny bits of the film and, were I to be able to go back and edit the movie, they’re the parts I’d edit out.

Plus, it’s a film from the 1990s so there’s a few gay jokes that don’t land. It was the humor of the time, sadly, and people seemed less offended (on the whole) by that humor than they are now. Thankfully these jokes don’t really punch down, but I still feel like they’re unnecessary on the whole. While I understand where we came from, that doesn’t mean these jokes play well now and, again, I do wish they weren’t here. There’s plenty of other humor in the film that doesn’t feel the need to hit these stereotypes, so we know Brooks could do better when he wanted.

And I think, on the whole, that speaks a lot to this film. It’s honestly a mixed bag with a lot of funny material mixed in with a bunch of jokes that haven’t aged well for various reasons. It was also Brook’s last successful parody film with his DraculaHe's the great undead fiend, the Prince of Darkness, the monster based on a real historical figure. He... is Dracula! parody killing his directing career soon after. Going through his filmography I can see why. I like his later works well enough, especially this film and Spaceballs, but his parodies started to feel tired. This film is uneven when, even ten years ago, you feel like he would have had more to say, and more jokes that could land, in a film like this. This was both his last success and a sign of things to come, and while I’m happy he could have this success, I’m not surprised that the comedian was forced to back away from the director’s chair soon after.

At least on the movie screen. He did go on to have solid success over on Broadway readapting his films into musicals, and that’s great. You love to see directors take the hint and try something new, and Brooks was able to pivot with aplomb. That’s really the best ending you could hope for here.