Michael Sarnoski’s The Death of Robin Hood is about as unappetizing a summer release as one can imagine, and that’s not to suggest that putting this movie out in November (or, let’s be real, January) would have fundamentally changed much about what’s wrong with it. But there’s something particularly egregious about releasing a revisionist Robin Hood – no Merry Men here, fuckhead, just cold-hard-steel – soaked in desaturated greys and blues during the time of year when folks yearn the most for escapist entertainment. Should some poor bastard be forced to choose between seeing this or Toy Story this Saturday night, you’d forgive them for suddenly summoning up the courage to care about the Netherlands and Sweden face-off in Houston instead of heading out to the theater. Really, though, it just shows why this type of revisionism is such a god-awful idea – think Brett Ratner’s Hercules – in that it makes an iconic myth into something wholly generic. Take the name “Robin Hood” off the tin, and you have a story about a thief praying for death and a prioress all too willing to help him out.
If you consider that a spoiler, I’ll point you to Robin Hood’s Death, the 17th-century Old English poem upon which this story is based, penned by a poet whose name has been lost to time. Consider A Gest of Robyn Hode as a Gospel, and Death would be one of its apocryphal counterparts excluded by a Nicene Council – it shares much of the same details, expands and clarifies on some of them, and would likely be more influential were we to have access to the full poem (only roughly half survives). I don’t want to get too bogged down in the historiography or literary merit of this text, but I’d just like to stress that it’s compatible with the other tales that make up the mythos – a heroic thief who took from the rich and gave to the poor and so on. Sarnoski discards all of that, instead burdening Robin (Hugh Jackman) with the fact that he can’t ever live up to the tales told about him. All of those laurels were for Errol Flynn, not the man who would be Logan.
Honestly, it’s kind of ironic that Jackman would sign up for the one Flynn-adjacent project that can’t seize on his natural charisma and theatricality – I can think of a handful of actors who would be well-suited to star in a spiritual successor to Michael Curtiz’s The Adventures of Robin Hood, and he’d be one of them. Instead, he’s po-faced and grim, a ferociously savage hermit living a spartan life surrounded by the rocky graves of those looking to settle scores with him. The film’s prologue follows one of these pilgrims, a teenage girl feigning hunger, who arrives at Robin’s campsite begging for a scrap of roast rabbit. The girl’s heard tales of the man called Robin Hood, but he’s quick to dispel them all. There were no maids, nor merry men, nor a good-and-evil struggle against Nottingham’s finest – just a dead sheriff and a whole lot of tavern bluster. She tries to cut his throat during the night, but his senses are too sharp and his blade too quick (“You should have bathed,” he says). As she gurgles out a few answers to his questions about why she came – it’s kind of hard to talk with a knife in your throat – he gets ready to plunge the knife into the side of her skull and add her to the makeshift graveyard.
See? This ain’t your papa’s Robin Hood, and Jackman scowls his way through two hours and change of ho-hum horseshit, barely selling his character’s corroded soul or, as you might expect, his spiritual redemption. He’s put on the path towards that end by Little John (a miscast Bill Skarsgard), who is posing as a farmer he killed, having taken the deceased’s wife and daughter as his own. A family of outlaws has taken his faux-family hostage, and John turns to the one man who he knows is better than anybody else at killing. So, in what might be the most compelling section of the movie, he and Robin trek back to his house and slaughter the men, with Robin delivering the coup de grace – an arrow fired directly into the back of a child’s head as he flees the battle. Unfortunately for everyone, the kid’s name is apparently Phineas Gage, and he survives long enough to head back home and tell his extended family what happened. They come in the middle of the night, and a drunk Robin is thrust into intense, bone-shattering combat. By some horrible miracle, he survives, and John, along with his daughter, carts him off to a mystical priory to recover.
This idyllic island fortress has been a spiritual haven for generations – for the druids, the Romans, the Normans, and so on – and it’s led by the Prioress (Jodie Comer), who is in touch with the magic buried deep beneath the grounds. She nurses Robin back to health, puts him to work in the garden, and lets him envision a world where he might be… happy. Weird, huh? It gets even more touching when John’s daughter, now orphaned, shows up, and he gets to be a surrogate father figure to the girl. Wonder where they got that idea. He trades wits with a leper (Murray Bartlett) who may know a bit more about Robin’s past than he’s letting on, though he’s dressed like a member of the Foot Clan, so he probably knows the Secret of the Ooze. And, of course, he has to contend with the marauding family’s son (Noah Jupe), who comes in disguise to settle the score between his clan and Robin. Plus, there’s the matter of the Prioress’s past, and what led her, a young and reasonably wealthy young woman, to renounce her former life and devote herself to the church. Hint: Robin’s involved.
Look, Sarnoski’s not a bad filmmaker – his debut, Pig, was anchored by a soulful Nicolas Cage performance which helped smooth over some of the goofy elements (Portland restaurant fight club, anyone?); his franchise follow-up, A Quiet Place: Day One, retained some of that odd profundity even as he wilted under the weight of Paramount pressure*. Yet there’s none of that sensitivity here, and it’s almost bizarre how weightless the entire endeavor feels. Jackman, perhaps seeking a Logan whose corpse Ryan Reynolds can’t dig up to beat faceless MCU goons, discovers that the well he and James Mangold prospected is good and tapped. The mythos prevents us from being able to accept his characterization as gospel: Robin’s just such a bastard that it is hard to believe he would be that terrible, and Jackman’s too damn likable for us not to doubt his honesty when he says he’s a murdering, robbing monster. The entire film hinges upon an off-screen backstory that comes across as bitter bluster rather than exposition – no matter how many people roll up on Robin and demand he draw, you just don’t buy it.
Worse, it’s fundamentally inert as drama. After some hand-slicing, leg-breaking violence early on, the action is all internal, the end a whimper so faint you might sleep through it. We get that Robin’s haunted by his past and his memories, but if the entire point of the feature is that he comes to accept his legend as his contribution to the world, the would-be viewer would be better off just staying home and watching The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. You know, a revisionist feature that understands the genre and stories that it’s working with, made by a group of icons at the top of their game, reinterpreting the performances and pictures that made them famous rather than going through the motions. I used to think it was a travesty that Nottingham, a similarly styled revisionist screenplay about the Good Sheriff versus The Evil Thief, wound up becoming Sir Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood – a bad movie, to be sure, but one at least trying to bridge history and the legend in some interesting way without wholly undermining what makes this tale so compelling. It’s like trying to make Arthur into a Roman general or Hercules into just another buff Greek: without their defining attributes, they’re just fucking dull. Or it could be that, like Arthur, being the subject of a good parody screwed up the story for a few generations. Thanks, Mel Brooks.
* No lie, I still think about that scene in which, after nearly drowning in a subway station, Joseph Quinn stumbles upon a cat on the street, and, confused and stressed, nearly breaks into tears – a genuine, heartbreaking moment that belongs in a significantly better film.