The end of Michael Sarnoski’s third full-length feature is in its title: The Death of Robin Hood. We wait it out. We know the iconic intellectual property—the man called Robin Hood—will die, and then he does. Then the film is over; its inevitable and straightforward.
Fortunately, Sarnoski is comfortable with inevitability—something we might recall from his first full length, Pig (2021). In it, Nicolas Cage traverses Portland, dreaming of doomsday. He contemplates the Cascadia subduction zone, a real tectonic boundary that could cause a massive earthquake. He occasionally monologues about Portland being wiped out, swallowed by the imagined tsunami that earthquake could cause.
In Pig, Cage plays grizzled shell-of-a-man Rob Feld, a misanthropic former chef who’s absconded to Mt. Hood National Forest to escape Portland’s elite food scene, taking only his truffle-hunting pig and a bellyful of resentment. When his pig is kidnapped, Rob is drawn back to the city and necessarily reacquaints himself with old colleagues by reminding them that soon this city will drown.
Bleak tidings and bleaker tales, but Sarnoski brings dignity to bleakness. When listening to Cage speak of the apocalypse at Portland’s doorstep, we’re encouraged not to despair, but to instead spend each fleeting moment doing something we love. Similarly, in Sarnoski’s second film, A Quiet Place: Day One, he constructs a moment of peace around a character’s acceptance of their own mortality. Sarnoski’s stories show people scraping through the end times by finding something to hold onto for whatever time they have left.
All of which can tip into acceptable degrees of corniness—your taste for what’s acceptable corn may vary—but his sober tact is undoubtedly effective, infusing genre flicks with patient and exceedingly human drama. Sarnoski’s not so much subverting the tropes of the revenge actioner (about the man who finds justice for his stolen pig) or of the sci-fi horror blockbuster, but kneading them, turning them over, and giving them some air.
Given this pedigree, it makes sense the director’s gone from arch-prestigious indie fare to big-budget franchise entry, and then to a mixture between the two: The Death of Robin Hood, a dark and gritty retelling of the Robin Hood story, because we don’t have enough of this shit already.
Sarnoski’s regular cinematographer Patrick Scola wreaths The Death of Robin Hood’s northern Ireland locales with unforgiving elements, conveying the sense that we are at the edge—and therefore at the end—of civilization. We meet vaguely elderly Robin Hood (Hugh Jackman) at the close of the 13th century.
As the haggard and hirsute Cage hermited-out in Pig, so does Jackson’s Robin toil as an efficient homicide machine in a late medieval world rife with homicide. His day is one where every peasant has like… a 70 percent chance that outlaws such as Robin Hood and/or his psychopathic sometimes-companion Little John (Bill Skarsgård, typecast as a dependably menacing, dirty weirdo) will come out of the mist-laden woods to pillage their homestead.
Yes, it sucked to be alive back then, and The Death of Robin Hood spends its opening act cramming that notion down your throat—submitting the human body to gruesome violence, such as cramming a sharp object down someone’s throat. Jackson as Robin glides with mechanical grace through these initial melees, doling out frequent stabbings, maimings, and bludgeonings. Not long into the film, he rips a guy’s hand in half. It’s pretty sick.
After a quarter-century playing superhero brute Wolverine as a prolific mass-murderer-cum-myth, Jackman is unsurprisingly at home in the skin of a folkloric figure whose violence has made them legend. His Robin is pursued by both the many generations of family members whose loved one(s) he’s butchered and by the story of the outlaw Robin Hood, a false idol and the stuff of shared fireside stories.
Accordingly, Robin is badly injured in one of the aforementioned homestead annihilations, trying to take back Little John’s farm, which wasn’t really even his in the first place. Little John had killed a man and usurped the man’s family, came to love them deeply, and then had the family taken from him as well—a ceaseless cycle of family absorption.
Escaping with only his young daughter, Little John drags (and then eventually rows) the unconscious Robin to a priory perched on the cliffs of a nearby island. There, the prioress Brigid (Jodie Comer) accepts the lies Robin tells her about who he is and what he’s done, showing him kindness and companionship as he convalesces. He even befriends a noble leper (Murray Bartlett) who tends to the island’s fruit orchards.
Comer inhabits Brigid as an earthy matriarch, plugged into the island’s druidic magic and tending to muse aloud about quantum physics. What is fate but the chance entanglement of two microscopic particles, “the precision of balance” splayed out on a cosmic scale? Sarnoski seems to love putting these obviously heightened speeches between his characters’ teeth. Like Pig‘s Feld, Brigid experiences life at the mercy of sudden and inexplicable death, and so embraces what little time she’s been given by the randomness of the universe. After all, an outlaw could emerge at any moment to liquidate everyone she loves.
This is all very familiar for anyone who’s seen a redemption arc played out on the big screen, and for much of The Death of Robin Hood the film quietly toys with our expectations about how and when violence will resurface to once again consume the screen.
However, following all that slaughter in the film’s first minutes, Sarnoski is remarkably restrained, to the detriment of so much of the film’s pacing. We start to wonder if the climactic action scenes teased by the opening violent salvo would add a needed helping of energy. Something to look forward to.
Handsomely rendered and thoughtfully realized, The Death of Robin Hood is also stiflingly dull. It mistakes slowness for depth, even as it creeps toward its inevitable conclusion. And when the end finally does come, we feel like we’ve been waiting too long for something to happen. Who knew that killing a myth could be so boring?
The Death of Robin Hood opens in wide release Thurs June 18, 123 minutes, rated R
