Who was Robin Hood? As with any long-lived figure in the popular imagination  and the legend of the outlaw of Sherwood Forest and his Merry Men goes back to the Middle Ages  the answer changes with the times. In the movies he has been played most memorably by Errol Flynn, most forgettably by Kevin Costner and now, least merrily, by Russell Crowe.

In the long, bloody, self-serious new version of the legend, directed by Ridley Scott from a script by Brian Helgeland, Robin is not “Hood” at all, but Longstride, an archer in the army of King Richard the Lionheart on his way home from the Crusades. Perhaps taking its cue from the recent spate of superhero origin stories, “Robin Hood” takes us back to the character’s early life, and shows how he became the mischievous outlaw of future Mel Brooks and Bugs Bunny spoofs.

You may have heard that Robin Hood stole from the rich and gave to the poor, but that was just liberal media propaganda. This Robin is no socialist bandit practicing freelance wealth redistribution, but rather a manly libertarian rebel striking out against high taxes and a big government scheme to trample the ancient liberties of property owners and provincial nobles. Don’t tread on him!

So is “Robin Hood” one big medieval tea party? Kind of, though that description makes the movie sound both more fun and more provocative than it actually is. The film’s politics, in any case, are more implicit than overt, so that the filmmakers can plausibly deny any particular topical agenda. Which is fair enough: the fight of ragged warriors against sniveling and sadistic tyrants appeals across tastes and ideologies. In our own minds, at least at the movies, we are all embattled underdogs standing up for our rights against a bunch of overprivileged jerks who won’t leave us alone.