The fifth collaboration between director Ridley Scott and leading man Russell Crowe (Body of Lies, American Gangster, A Good Year, Gladiator, count ’em) won’t satisfy your craving for the legend, but perhaps your craving, if any, for Dark Age dreariness, savage combat (shot in that skittery long-lens style that looks as if the film has slipped its sprockets), and egalitarian bombast. It takes two and a quarter hours for the hero to be branded an outlaw — as well as for the sun to break through the clouds — and by then the movie is over (“And so the legend begins”), giving it the onerous and ominous feel of only Part One. More simply, the narrative feels padded, dillydallying, ill-framed; in a word, a “prequel,” although all the familiar names are already present and accounted for, Friar Tuck, Little John, Will Scarlet, Alan A’Dayle, the Sheriff of Nottingham, and of course Marian, none of whom has much to do apart from the last one, who is now no maid but instead a war widow (a misguided Middle Eastern campaign, for timely relevance) and at the climax a comrade in arms, a proto-Joan of Arc, like Guinevere in the King Arthur of 2004. (The Age of Chivalry evidently ended before it commenced.) For all the scrupulously researched fidelity to period in the heaviness of costumes, crudeness of artifacts, grubbiness of hygiene, and so forth, the movie is sanctimoniously progressive in all political, social, sexual matters, a slight case of schizophrenia. With Cate Blanchett, Mark Strong, Mark Addy, William Hurt, Oscar Isaac, Eileen Atkins, and Max von Sydow. (2010) — Duncan Shepherd