Legends are made not in the real world, but in the stories and fables told by men to children. History is told by adults to each other, but the legends that forge culture are formed when men and women hand down stories of bravura and kindness to their next generations. Everyone knows of Robin Hood as the merry bandit who stole from the rich and helped the poor. He has been a great equalizer of sorts in children’s fables and story books, but is that the real story? Director Michael Sarnoski’s The Death of Robin Hood, tells a very different story of the bandit. It’s less naive and more macabre. Forget an Errol Flynn like hero, Hugh Jackman’s Robin is a veritable monster, a merciless killer. And yet there’s the poetic redemption, a journey so distinctly dramatic that you’re surprised by the reformation, the evolution and of course the redemption.
Sarnoski, working from the 17th-century ballad rather than the storybook version, understands something Disney never wanted children to learn. Myths are edited for comfort long after the men who inspired them are gone. The film’s opening act, all mud and torchlight and maces crushing bone, exists to strip away every ounce of swagger before it lets you near the man underneath. And that’s where the film’s real ambition lives, not in the violence, but in the patience, it asks of you afterward. Redemption takes time. Sometimes it’s a matter of days, sometimes it could be years and for some it could be an entire lifetime. Sarnoski seems to genuinely believe this, structuring the priory sections as something closer to penance than plot, Robin relearning gentleness in close-up, scene by unhurried scene.
Hugh Jackman gives the performance everything physical he has. At 57, he wears Robin’s exhaustion in his spine, in the laboured way he moves like a man who has spent forty years running from something he can’t outrun. It’s a committed, bruising physical performance, and it’s frequently the film’s best special effect. But there’s a limit to it. Where James Cagney, walking to the chair in Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), could turn his whole face into a question mark, genuine terror masquerading as cowardice, the audience never quite sure which one they were watching. Jackman’s eyes stay locked on intensity. Even in his final scenes, that hard, haunted glare doesn’t crack open into the kind of naked vulnerability this character has earned the right to show us. We believe he’s suffered. We don’t always believe he’s been undone by it.
Jodie Comer does some of the film’s most controlled work as Sister Brigid, finding stillness that never tips into piety, and Bill Skarsgård is nearly unrecognizable as an aged, domesticated Little John. There’s real ache in watching him beg his old friend for one last act of violence he knows will cost them both something. Pat Scola’s 35mm cinematography is the film’s most consistent pleasure: the fog-drenched wilderness in the first half gives way to a boxier, intimate frame once Robin reaches the priory, and the visual grammar shift tells you where the story’s heart actually is before the script catches up.
That’s the film’s real problem. It knows its themes with total clarity, but it circles them so long that the eventual reckoning with the long beckoning death, quiet and spiritual as Sarnoski clearly wanted it, feels underwhelming. Jackman’s Robin is a hark back of sorts to Gregory Peck’s Jimmy Ringo in The Gunfighter (1950). Like Ringo, Robin is a man cornered by his own legend, wanting only to lay it down. But where that film moved with lean, unbroken tension toward its ending, this one meanders and the payoff arrives more with gravitas but it’s not devastating.
A note for anyone walking in cold, the opening’s violence is genuinely brutal, sustained, and unglamorous. This is not a film for the squeamish or the nostalgic.
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