Riled Robin: Russell Crowe storms out of Radio 4 interview after being accused of giving hero an Irish accent 
 
 
 
 It was the equivalent of waving a red flag in front of a bull. 
 
 Russell Crowe - already smarting over the critics' reaction to his portrayal of Robin Hood - stood accused of making the hero of Sherwood Forest sound a little Irish. 
 
 Interviewer Mark Lawson should have known what was coming. 
 
 There was a simmering denial, an expletive or two and a rather sudden end to the conversation. 
 
 SCROLL DOWN TO LISTEN TO AUDIO (WARNING: CONTAINS BAD LANGUAGE) 
 
 Gladiators, ready! Russell Crowe became riled when Mark Lawson queried his accent on Radio 4 arts show Front Row 
 
 
 
 Crowe, who has a prickly reputation, had been talking to Lawson about his new film Robin Hood for BBC Radio 4's Front Row programme. 
 
 Things went wrong when Lawson started dissecting Crowe's accent in the movie. 
 
 He suggested there were 'hints' of Irish in the supposedly English accent. 
 
 Outburst: Hollywood star Russell Crowe walked out on a BBC Radio 4 interview after being riled by accusations he had made Robin Hood sound Irish 
 
 The 46-year-old New Zealandborn star, who lives in Australia, was having none of it. 
 
 'You've got dead ears, mate,' he said ominously. 
 
 'You've seriously got dead ears if you think that's an Irish accent.' 
 
 HOW THE TESTY EXCHANGE UNFOLDED Mark Lawson: 'The accent that you've given him, there are hints to me of Irish, but what... were you thinking in those terms?' Russell Crowe: 'You've got dead ears mate, you've seriously got dead ears, if you think that's an Irish accent.' 
 
 Lawson: 'Hints of, I thought...' 
 
 Crowe (interrupting): 'B*******.' (Crowe then talks about his portrayal of Robin Hood before coming back to the accent issue) 
 
 Crowe: 'I'm a little dumbfounded you could possibly find any Irish in that character, that's kind of ridiculous anyway, but it's your show.' 
 
 Lawson: 'So you're... well, I am just asking... so you're going for northern English?' 
 
 Crowe: 'No, I was going for an Italian, yeah, missed it? (Laughs) F*** me! (The actor then refuses to answer a question about whether he had not wanted to deliver some of his most famous lines in Gladiator) 
 
 Crowe: 'I don't get the Irish thing by the way. I don't get it at all.' (He finishes the interview, waving his cigarette and walking out). Crowe went on to talk about the character but the accusation had clearly hit a raw nerve. 'I'm a little dumbfounded that you could possibly find any Irish in that character - that's kind of ridiculous, but it's your show,' he said. Lawson, who was interviewing Crowe at the Dorchester Hotel in London, did his best to smooth things over. But there was no turning back. 
 
 Crowe then refused to answer questions about whether he had not wanted to deliver some of his most famous lines in the blockbuster Gladiator. He is said to have then waved his cigarette and walked off. Voice coaches working on Robin Hood, which like Gladiator-was directed by Ridley Scott, have said they wanted their hero to have an accent closer to the natives of Rutland, which is south east of Nottingham in the East Midlands. But one critic has claimed Crowe's accent 'sounds like an Australian doing an impression of Jim Bowen off Bullseye', while another suggested he had 15 different accents. Last week, Crowe revealed how he had worked on his English accent by listening to tapes of Michael Parkinson. 
 
 'If you look at the early ballads about Robin Hood he's connected to Barnsdale and historians argue Yorkshire and Nottingham are the two places he could have come from,' he said. 
 
 'So yes, I listened to a lot of Parky - that was a great help.' Crowe's bad temper has led to a number of run-ins over the years. 
 
 In 2005, he was charged with second-degree assault after throwing a telephone at a worker at the Mercer Hotel in New York. ||||| Critic's Rating: 2 1/2 stars 
 
 Journal Sentinel TV and film critic Duane Dudek looks at life on the small and big screen, and some of the cool stuff on both. 
 
 There have been more films about Robin Hood than arrows in a quiver. 
 
 The earliest, with Douglas Fairbanks is almost 90 years old; the definitive version, with Errol Flynn, is more than 70 years old; and Sean Connery, Kevin Costner and Disney have all taken a whack at the myth. 
 
 And if you've seen any of these - or "Braveheart," "Rob Roy," "The Patriot" or "Gladiator," for that matter - then you've seen the new version by director Ridley Scott with Russell Crowe, a torpid action movie about land reform with the exhausted quality of material so thin you can see right through it. 
 
 It is not your father's, or your grandfather's, "Robin Hood"; it just acts like it is. As a prequel, it throws a new coat of paint on a familiar legend, but its revisionism feels like artifice and contrivance. 
 
 The backstory, about the Crusades, Robin's tortured personal life and how he met the fair MaidMarian is a burdensome and dirge-like overture to a 140-minute-long tale in which both the journey and the destination are predetermined. 
 
 Scott - working from a screenplay by Brian Helgeland, the Oscar-winning writer of "L.A. Confidential" and of the medieval fantasy "A Knight's Tale" - sets this prefabrication on an impressively tactile, live-action foundation. Costumes, locations and other inanimate affectations add a verisimilitude that makes the digital effects in "Iron Man 2" look like the cartoons they are. 
 
 But "Robin Hood" is less old-school than prehistoric, a primer in genre boilerplate, period generalizations and action-film set pieces. 
 
 Crowe's title character is an archer on his way home from the Crusades who, aping the legend of Martin Guerre, assumes the identity of a dead knight; falls in love with the man's widow, played by a dignified and unadorned Cate Blanchett; stumbles onto a plot by the French to invade England; and organizes an army of noblemen and peasants with various grievances against their foolish and duplicitous king to fight against them. 
 
 And he is helped throughout by eccentric and bawdy sidekicks who will become his merry band of guerillas. 
 
 There are even scenes where he robs from the rich, Blanchett is harassed by the evil sheriff of Nottingham and Crowe rides into battle in slow motion. 
 
 And, as with most pre-Industrial Revolution mechanical devices, you can see all these gears turning slowly before your eyes. 
 
 Although moon-faced Crowe is still agile a decade after he and Scott collaborated on "Gladiator," he never seems emotionally engaged here. Whether propped on a horse or plopped into a scene, he has the detached quality of someone doing his job because it's his job. 
 
 As a result, his character never feels completely integrated into the dense and convoluted story that bears his name. 
 
 Robin Hood ** 1/2 
 
 Cast: Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett, Max von Sydow, William Hurt, Mark Strong, Oscar Isaac, Danny Huston, Eileen Atkins, Mark Addy, Kevin Durand, Scott Grimes, Matthew Macfadyen 
 
 Behind the scenes: Produced by Ridley Scott, Brian Grazer and Russell Crowe. Written by Brian Helgeland. Directed by Ridley Scott. 
 
 Rated: PG-13; violence, warfare, sexual innuendo 
 
 Approximate running time: 140 minutes 
 
 E-mail: ddudek@journalsentinel.com
– He didn't throw anything, but Russell Crowe is making headlines again for his temper. The Robin Hood star walked out on a BBC interviewer who pushed him a bit too far with questions about the legendary outlaw's accent—and some stale gossip about Gladiator. "Front Row" host Mark Lawson said he detected some Irish in the accent the native New Zealander adopted for Robin Hood, and Crowe responded, "Bollocks," reports the Daily Mail. The interview proceeded, and Crowe eventually returned to the matter of the accent, saying, "I'm a little dumbfounded you could possibly find any Irish in that character—that's kind of ridiculous, but it's your show." He was a lot less forgiving when Lawson brought up a recent book that claims Crowe didn't want to do the climactic scene in Gladiator—the actor got up and left. Listen to the interview here; it gets contentious at around 5:50 and ends shortly after the 10-minute mark.