Fight Clip Club: Robin Hood: Men in Tights

Real English accents and the Merriest Men around.

Especially in the wake of …:gestures widely:... I’m finding myself continuing to be drawn to funny or at least pleasant fight scenes for Fight Clip Club. With how the world is going right now, a dark and gritty fight scene is really not to my taste. I hope you agree. So I’m continuing our weekly analyses with funny fight scenes that are delightful pieces of clowning. This is one of my favorites: a short and sweet bit from Men in Tights. 

---

This Mel Brooks satire is less of a brilliant classic as many of his other films, and I think it may be because he sticks too closely to current events and to mocking specific current pop culture, rendering the movie cripplingly dated. Spaceballs works to this day as a comedy, because it satirizes the whole Star Wars franchise as well as broader cultural concepts such as merchandising popular movies, etc. Young Frankenstein is similar: it’s broader in scope and so remains way less dated than Men in Tights does. This movie came out in 1993, and as such, it’s obviously making fun of two other movies in particular: Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and The Little Mermaid. There are some nods to classics like Errol Flynn, but really it sticks to these two films only. It’s also very slow-paced, too slow even for an early-’90s comedy. It plods. 

What makes it at all watchable today (though IMO only in pieces), is the absolutely stellar cast: the lovely and talented Cary Elwes carries the whole thing, with a combination of dashingness and downright silliness. Top-tier British Shakespeareans and comedians like Roger Rees and Tracey Ullman, as well as slapstick veterans like Dom Deluise and Dick Van Patten (let alone Mel Brooks himself) as multiple minor characters make for gems of vignettes, and the culmination of Patrick Stewart at the end as Richard the Lionheart is… well the whole thing is unhinged. It should be a much better movie than it is.