Robin Hood: Men in Tights

It plays better than it reviews — the watch lands harder than the write-ups suggest.

• “Mel Brooks has made a movie that's completely free and spontaneous, which at the same time is not in any way lazy or sloppy. [28 July 1993, p.E1]”

  Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle · 100

• “Robin Hood: Men in Tights marks a return to the wild, anarchic scatological comedies that made Mel Brooks a marquee name around the world. It is a film for his diehard fans and for a new generation who only know Mad Mel from legend.”

  Leonard Klady, Variety · 80

• “Men in Tights does work more often than not, even if the jokes are a little cheaper than normal.”

  R.L. Shaffer, IGN · 70

• “Parodies are hard to do well, as is shown by the mediocrity of so many recent attempts. No matter how ripe a genre is for satirizing, unless you know how to do it, there are no guarantees. Fortunately for Men in Tights, Mel Brooks has been doing this kind of thing for decades.”

  James Berardinelli, ReelViews · 63

• “It should be said that this negligible absence of Brooks’s boundary hopping wit and untamed performances doesn’t quite render Men in Tights unwatchable. There’s an appropriate, albeit languid merriment to the proceedings kept alive by a few choice cameos (Dick van Patten, Dom DeLouise, Brooks himself) and a handful of gags that land on their feet.”

  Chris Cabin, Slant Magazine · 63