The latest cinematic iteration of Robin Hood could have been so much more than it turned out to be.

Robin of Loxley (Taron Egerton) is a young lord dallying with a would-be horse thief named Marian (Eve Hewson) when he is anachronistically drafted into service in the Third Crusade. He fights in the desert for four years, becoming in the process an expert bowman, before being shot and sent home by his commander, Guy of Gisbourne (Paul Anderson), for trying to save the life of a captured Muslim boy. The boy's one-handed father, Yahya, aka John (Jamie Foxx), stows away on Robin's ship and follows him back to England, inspired by Robin's noble attempt and believing he can lead a revolution against the ruling class. (His motivations for doing so, and why exactly he would decide to focus his efforts on far-away England, are never made clear.)

But Robin returns home to find he was declared dead some two years prior, his property seized, his manor left in ruins and Marian married to Will Tillman (Jamie Dornan), a poor villager with political aspirations. Robin is persuaded to don a concealing hood and mask and begin leading a double life, acting like a pampered lord while secretly robbing from the greedy Sheriff of Nottingham (Ben Mendelsohn) and redistributing the money to the poor.

No one ever questions where a lord who lost all his wealth is getting the money he spends so freely, nor does anyone ask why John, Robin Hood's unmasked sidekick, also is Robin of Loxley's servant. I'm also not sure why filmmakers thought it made sense to blend the popular figure of England's own Little John with a Moorish character invented for the BBC television series Robin of Sherwood and solidified into the legend by Kevin Costner's justifiably mocked Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

Like Prince of Thieves, this Robin Hood removes King Richard and Prince John from the story. Instead, the sheriff himself is the primary antagonist, conspiring with an all-powerful cardinal (F. Murray Abraham) to fund the Arabian side of the Crusades in a cockamamie scheme to take over all of England. Backing him, the sheriff commands vast armies of armored knights and former crusaders.

The movie boasts some fun set pieces, and some admittedly good performances from the cast. But unfortunately, that's about all the movie has going for it.

In costuming and set design, the filmmakers were unable to decide on a time or place for their movie to unfold. While it might have been an attempt to do something creative, it comes across instead as a poorly defined mess.

Perhaps most jarring, filmmakers turned Nottingham into a massive mining city, an industrial hellscape the likes of which England has never seen. Pleasant Sherwood Forest isn't Robin Hood's home in this movie; rather, he lives in the ruins of his family manor house.

The climactic battle that ends the movie is more like a modern street riot, fought with riot shields and Molotov cocktails. Filmmakers also proved throughout the movie that they have no real understanding of how bows were used in combat.

The ending sets up the sequel that, after devastatingly poor returns on the first movie, will never get made. It's kind of a shame, because the movie had legitimate potential that was squandered through the director's poor choices.