Before disregarding yet another Robin Hood movie, let’s acknowledge that writer-director Michael Sarnoski’s film The Death of Robin Hood is based on legit 17th-century source material. In fact, this historical precedent, such as it is, becomes the film’s main driver, informing its narrative while tweaking our sense of familiarity towards a satisfying, if not surprising, end.
As befits its title, The Death of Robin Hood finds the eponymous figure closer to his end than his beginning. Brought to life by a grizzled yet no less compelling Hugh Jackman, this Robin Hood is an old loner in an inhospitable landscape; he kills time the only way he can: by killing vengeful countrymen while regretting the reckless past that led him here. For a change, a reappearance from so-called “Little John” (Bill Skarsgård) sets Robin on a path not so much towards redemption, but to a reckoning nonetheless. Like Unforgiven (the apex of this type of film) or Jackman’s turn in Logan, Sarnoski’s story is a study of how violence warps a person, with death as the only real release; the added layer here is in how the film plays with our own expectations of what a Robin Hood tale should involve—archery, heroism, romance—and what this one is. There’s no way around this: the film’s opening third is brutal and will turn many a viewer off. Stick with it, though, and a fascinating silence settles in. Robin finds someone to save (Faith Delaney as young Margaret), and others (like a welcome Jodie Comer) who connect with and to him in ways he doesn’t anticipate. We, like Robin, are forced to reconsider what we know.
Shot in grand albeit harsh vistas with a sometimes overwhelming intensity, The Death of Robin Hood is actually a small film. What becomes most striking about it is Sarnoski’s gradual acknowledgement of this fact. The legend of Robin Hood is larger than life, and indeed inescapable. In response, his film cuts ever closer to the heart, leaving only what feels like the truth.
