‘The Death of Robin Hood’ Review: Gritty Take on the Folk Legend Takes Rich Text and Makes it Poor [C-]

The opening minutes of 1938’s The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring Errol Flynn as the folk legend, show him striding into the banquet hall of Nottingham Castle, filmed in vibrant Technicolor, the hero clad in his gaudy green tunic and tights, mocking corrupt Norman lords and establishing Robin’s role as a fighter for the downtrodden. The first five minutes of The Death of Robin Hood feature Hugh Jackman as an aged version of the man, looking like a particularly grievous Geralt of Rivia, haunted and scarred, huddled alone among the stark cliffs of medieval England. He soon murders a passing girl whom he shared food with, who then attempts to sneak up on him — a blade in her throat, blood spurting out, the life draining from her. Robin Hood doesn’t look remorseful as much as exhausted. 

The character of Robin Hood has evolved significantly over the hundreds of years the legend has existed, and has seen changes just as drastic in his near-90-year history on the silver screen. From cartoonish live action to an actual cartoon to a goofy spoof to more hard-hitting, propulsive contemporary versions, the character has taken on different lives through various leading men across Hollywood’s history, such as Flynn, Kevin Costner, Cary Elwes, Russell Crowe, Taron Egerton, and plenty more. Pig and A Quiet Place: Day One writer and director Michael Sarnoski, however, looks to demystify the character altogether, stripping him of his man-of-the-people charity and reverting him to his original, darker form: a rogue, a wretch, a killer. 

In practice, this is a lateral move from Pig, in which audiences certainly expected Nicolas Cage to brutalize people without mercy for the return of his truffle pig; instead, he goes on an odd, quiet, humanistic quest of mournful reflection. If that movie was an anti-thriller, The Death of Robin Hood is an anti-epic, seeking to distill generations of Robin Hood mythology to the primeval core of his being, giving audiences the aesthetic context of an intense period action film and gradually scaling it down to intimate human drama as the film plods along.

And plod it does. While the A24 marketing team is doing their damndest to sell this movie as Robin Hood: The Northman, what Sarnoski delivers is an overly austere trudge through solemn pretension, making for a gritty drama that’s both intentionally and unintentionally miserable. Defined by an overbearing tone of gauzy portent, The Death of Robin Hood is suffocated by the inert severity with which it approaches its concept. 

If there’s any part of the film that passively resembles Robert Eggers’ aforementioned arthouse Viking thriller, it’s the opening 15 minutes. Sarnoski proposes a different type of film at the start: one that places Robin Hood at the center of ferocious violence and harsh gore. He and his accomplice Little John (Bill Skarsgård) are depicted as ruthless and uncompromising, looking to settle the score with a nearby family in a vicious set-piece — you can be sure that in no other Robin Hood film will you see a man have his head impaled by a burning stake. When it comes down to the final confrontation, our protagonist is ready to die after a lifetime of roaming and killing throughout an unforgiving world.

Unfortunately for him, he wakes in the care of Sister Brigid (Jodie Comer) and her convent, who set about nursing this strange man — Robin, adopting the name Randolph — back to health. He learns to walk again, helps with the community’s duties, and takes charge of a young girl, Little Margaret (Faith Delaney). By falling into the routine of a group working for mutual benefit, this lone-world cutthroat may have found a quiet opportunity for redemption.

There are plenty of subversive genre movies that cast the potential for newfound personal grace on the verge of death as the dramatic crux — hell, with Hugh Jackman playing a hardened anti-hero who becomes a father figure to a little girl, there’s a fair bit of DNA from the more action-oriented Logan in here. However, The Death of Robin Hood‘s humorless, po-faced temperament resists genuine emotional involvement. By playing everything so cold and content to cast the character as a broad medieval archetype, there’s simply not much to latch onto by the time Jackman has sensitive, fatherly moments teaching Margaret how to shoot a bow and arrow.

Though Jackman, as ever, commits fully to the placidly tormented quality of the character. His Robin Hood, though brutal, isn’t one to blow his lid, approaching every situation with intense focus and stillness, calculating the continued weight on his soul. If any of the character’s anguished quality is communicated, it isn’t in the script: it’s through Jackman’s routine ability to command the screen, even if the film’s plot and more intimate beats are choked by how each actor is directed to hoarsely mumble and grumble under their thick accents. 

Comer is reliable as ever, though it’s quickly clear that most characters exist to orbit Robin Hood’s salvation and won’t have much more than a role as devices to complete the thematic arc. That’s a problem when your lead character is simultaneously transparent and inscrutable, with a familiar spiritual dilemma that should drive more intense reckonings about whether forgiveness is possible in the face of a lifetime of transgressions. Sarnoski’s funeral-procession quietude feels true to him as a director, but the coldness too often rejects real connection to his ideas. 

Mining some supplementary beauty to bolster the material is Sarnoski’s regular cinematographer, Patrick Socla, whose simple panoramas of the dramatic Irish cliffsides, forests, coasts, and castles lend visual weight, all cast in a sobering, washed-out gray color palette. The general art direction from Hauke Richter, production design from David Lee, and costume design by Lorna Marie Mugan all contribute to a storied, gothic world of death, scoundrels, and legends. 

Sarnoski occasionally tries to explore the malleability of those legends. Robin Hood, at times, speaks about his popular persona and seems to be in direct conversation with the generations of stories that would surround his name hundreds of years into the future. It’s an interesting wrinkle, but one stamped out by the film’s more predictable dynamics: the world-weary savage, his unexpected young companion, and the path to breaking cycles of violence. These are foundational ideas that help make up the bedrock of similar mature fables. The Death of Robin Hood grounds them into dust with a brooding glare.

A24 will release The Death of Robin Hood only in theaters on June 19.