‘Robin Hood’ has the summer action feel, without the explosions

No bombs. No guns. No super-powered special effects cartoonish fantasy. Instead, amazingly elaborate depictions of medieval European combat technique, authentic feudal lifestyles and dirty politics in chain mail provide the spectacle. Showers of hundreds of Englishmen’s arrows raining down over the white cliffs of Dover into French skulls … take that, Iron Man.

Still imposing headliner Russell Crowe — with his go-to director and producing partner Ridley Scott — has created a “Robin Hood” devoid of the swashbuckling playfulness of the oft-filmed legend, as first embedded by golden age Hollywood rascals Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn.

Earnest realism, as in the filmmakers’ previous period war epic “Gladiator,” prevails in this version. It theorizes how the fabled Robin (never confirmed as a real figure by scholars) might have become an outlaw. It only retains the recognizable character names and turn-of-the-12th century time frame from more familiar takes on the famous figure.

A perversion of both myth and established history, Brian Helgeland’s manipulating screenplay aggrandizes Crowe’s Robin Longstride into the guy who proposes the Magna Carta to the oppressive King John. Before that bizarre fictional turn, he’s a humble yeoman returning from the Crusades who scolds his leader King Richard (Danny Huston) for his war policy, personally delivers the late king’s crown to his succeeding brother John (Oscar Isaac), and almost single-handedly saves a nation when France’s double agent Godfrey (Mark Strong) prepares the way for invasion.

To do all that, Robin poses as a dead knight and takes up with his feisty widow, Marion Loxley, in Nottingham. Cate Blanchett plays “Maid Marian” as more proto-feminist than damsel in distress; her character becomes an absurd anachronism when she ends up on the battlefield alongside her man. But the actress commands the screen and shares substantial chemistry with her fellow Aussie, Crowe. These two are the real thing: charismatic movie stars and skilled thespians.

The ensemble also includes greats William Hurt, Eileen Atkins and Max von Sydow as the patriotic English aristocracy plus Kevin Durand as merryman-to-be Little John, Mark Addy as Friar Tuck, and Matthew Macfadyen as an impotent sheriff of Nottingham.

In this revisionist “Robin Hood,” there’s little stealing from the rich for the poor. In fact, present-day Tea Partiers might see allegory in a script full of anti-tax, anti-government, pro-grass-roots sentiment. Who knew the Dark Ages were now?