Michael Fairbanks
When the trailer for The Death of Robin Hood dropped on January 6th, it occurred to me that I have no attachment to the titular bandit. At least, not in his human form. I liked him well enough as an animated Fox, and his musical number in Shrek was iconic, but otherwise, he was a total mystery to me. I figured that before I witness Michael Sarnoski’s (Pig, A Quiet Place Day One) deconstruction of this legend, I should educate myself a little more.
I threw on 1938’s The Adventures of Robin Hood starring Errol Flynn. It was everything. A whimsical and romantic working-class uprising stunt show that influenced everyone from Rob Reiner to Jacques Tati. A genuine attempt to harken back to this era of filmmaking would’ve been a real palette cleanser in these trying times. Instead, we get The Death of Robin Hood, a relentlessly miserable slog that takes most of its cues from Ridley Scott’s entirely forgotten 2010 adaptation starring Russell Crowe. That film came out during the peak of the “make every classic film hero dark and gritty” era, and even still, nobody liked it. That film tried and failed to channel Gladiator and become boring and inoffensive. Meanwhile, Sornoski has concocted a pretentious and self-important lovechild of The Northman, The Last Jedi and Logan. The only thing that kept me going was the promise that eventually this numbskull I was watching would die.
In The Death of Robin Hood, we find an elder Robin Hood (Hugh Jackman) as he murders a young traveler who just happens to run into him. Why? Because she was telling stories about a man named Robin Hood who stole from the rich and gave to the poor. A hero! “Well,” as he insists as he snaps her neck, that he’s already impaled with an arrow, “that isn’t what happened.” Robin then reunites with running buddy Little John (Bill Skarsgård), who gets him into some mischief involving a woman he’s claimed as his wife. This results in a brutal and nearly fatal battle that ends with Robin Hood being swept away to a convent island of sorts. He forms a fast connection with Sister Brigid (Jodie Comer) and spends the rest of the film doddling around the place, reflecting upon all of his misdeeds and torment that have brought him to this vulnerable place.
I don’t have a problem with turning something lighthearted into something dark. In fact, I was intrigued by Michael Sarnoski’s mission to give us a Robin Hood film more inspired by the source material. However, I will not stand for how thunderously boring the execution of every single element at play here is in The Death of Robin Hood. It wants to show us this harsh and violent world, but takes Robin Hood to a serene retreat the moment he realizes that his card has been punched. Okay, fine. It can be a movie about Robin Hood trauma-dumping as he takes his final breaths. A great idea in theory. However, Sarnoski is so concerned with this being subtle and literary in tone that he and his cast forgo all sense of drama.
Assessing these performances is difficult because they are all so constricted by Sarnoski’s limited vision. Everyone is directed to mumble these anguished expository lines as gravely and quietly as possible. Meanwhile, Hugh Jackman’s getup is anything but subtle. He’s trapped in this Galdalfian hair and beard number that completely obscures his expressive eyes. I assume the intention was for him to look similar to Tatsuya Nakadai as Kurosawa’s decaying King Lear in Ran, but that is a very operatic film. At Sarnoski’s tempo, this look is painfully costumey. It’s silly enough to wonder how a film so desperately afraid of having any element of camp or fun could’ve allowed it through.
Meanwhile, Jodie Comer is on stoic autopilot. Her character is “caretaker who ultimately becomes conflicted,” which pales heavily in comparison to Maid Marian. Bill Skarsgård is thankfully only in the film for a few minutes. It’s too bad that he’s the character who, in many ways, emotionally anchors Robin’s entire arc. Skarsgård mournfully barks his way through his lines via a positively incomprehensible voice that continues his clownlike streak of shallow performances that value transformation over depth.
Michael Sarnoski continues to show the striking visual flair that has carried his career so far. Patrick Scola’s cinematography is immersive and often dreamlike in its contrasts. The outside world is a grey and pitch-black hell that only the bright serenity of Robin’s future resting place can break. The little action we do get is intimate and brutal. Naturally, it’s a film with a real reverence for death. It all just feels like polish here, though. In a story that is somehow both derivative and alienating, these flourishes mostly reveal that everyone involved could’ve quite capably made a better movie.
Hopefully, once The Death of Robin Hood crashes and burns, we can call it a day on films that simply exist to deconstruct stories that our grandparents loved. It’s hard to imagine who this is for. The youngest generation of people who actively turned a Robin Hood movie into a blockbuster did so in 1991. I promise you, none of them are following A24’s Twitter account closely enough to know about The Death of Robin Hood. If they did, they’d turn it off ten minutes in for being too boring (in fact, that’s a highball estimate for my parents). The Taron Edgerton Robin Hood didn’t exactly define a generation, so really, the only folks who will ever seek this out are A24 completist cinefiles.
People who have seen everything that The Death of Robin Hood tries to do dozens of times in better movies about characters who actually resonate with them. Speaking of, I cannot imagine how humiliating this all must be for Hugh Jackman. He did this whole Unforgiven routine in Logan, a character he actually got to define. Then, Ryan Reynolds undid all of that so that he could take part in the humiliation ritual that was Deadpool & Wolverine. Now, in search of artistic cred again, he’s decided that he simply must flagellate himself with a poetic on-screen demise once more. You did it, Hugh. I really believe that you’re never coming back.
