Hugh Jackman’s Robin Hood gets “saved,” but The Death of Robin Hood drains the myth

Michael Sarnoski’s The Death of Robin Hood stars Hugh Jackman as Robin Hood, and the movie basically does the “grim re-evaluation” move: it pulls the legendary outlaw out of pillaging and into something like survival-by-hospice. But here is the sting. Even when the story lets him heal under the island-bound supervision of Sister Brigid (Jodie Comer), it does not fully cash in the promise of a myth being reworked for modern audiences. Instead, the film often feels like it is standing at the edge of redemption, then politely refusing to jump.

The setup is familiar and purposely uncomfortable. Robin has long since given up his murdering and pillaging days, living in isolation in the hills, dirty and cold, hiding from whoever passes for Merry Men in this bleak world. His past is not a ghost. It is a threat. The story frames him not as a local bandit but as a prolific force of death, with those consequences stretching across England. An early set piece shows this propensity for killing in a period bloodbath closest to the messy ferocity of The Northman, though the violence is positioned as reactive rather than instigated. When Little John (Bill Skarsgård) comes calling for aid, Robin has tried to move on, stealing away someone’s farm only to discover the kin of those he took from will not let him.

This is revisionist genre storytelling that wants to eat at foundational fables. The A.V. Club notes that aged gunslingers, assassins, and samurai have all trudged toward oblivion, and points to superheroes like Logan, sent off by Hugh Jackman a decade earlier. The Death of Robin Hood shares that same kind of weariness and surrogate fatherhood vibe, but it leans into a slow drip toward its ending. The motion is there. The myth is getting stared down. Yet the piece’s central complaint is that the subversion often stays shallow, because the narrative and emotions at the core do not punch through.

Visually, Sarnoski and the film’s craft still go hard. Robin’s knife-and-arrow skills are not treated as spectacle; they are framed as horror. The film’s lighting gets its own love letter, with torches, campfires, hearths, and flaming huts. When it uses sweeping drone shots, it soaks the rocky landscape in a way that is clearly meant to feel lived-in and brutal. Period details are a big deal too: the A.V. Club specifically calls out the visceral jab of a bloodletting fleam as more effective than the movie’s traditional weaponry. There is also a “fabulist’s eye” in the framing, with a bit of weirdness that sometimes slips through in a way that recalls The Green Knight.

And then comes the pivot into the thing executives and creatives should actually pay attention to: the tonal and narrative translation of violence into something else. Once Robin is under the island-bound supervision of Sister Brigid, the film shifts from violent elegy to plodding hospice care. It surrounds him with orphans and the dying, including a charming leper played by Murray Bartlett under layers of prosthetics and protective garments. In other words, this is where the movie wants to consider “the health of his legacy.” It does that through bow-making montages, maudlin and over-literal conversations about stories, and a small chance at redemption when two youngsters (played by Noah Jupe and Faith Delaney) wash up on the shore of this isolated paradise.

But the review lands on the central failure mode. Robin’s internal reckoning stays at a remove. He moves through a second chance with hard blankness, neither fully regretful for what led him to this point nor entirely resentful that Brigid saved him from the release of death. The result is self-serious limbo: appealingly brutal period texture, but without the emotion needed to pierce the harsh world it constructs. The A.V. Club basically says it is not hard to believe a famous outlaw lived a far more complicated and grisly life than tall tales suggest. What is harder is finding more than a single note amid a dull, sludgy drama.

For peers making or funding premium genre properties, the second-order lesson is not “deconstruct myths” versus “keep myths.” The lesson is that emotional mechanics still have to work. The Death of Robin Hood is about a sad old man, thinking about how much he wishes he was already dead, and it follows other Michael Sarnoski work that uses the same structural shock: someone convinced they are beyond the reach of the rest of the world gets violently disabused of that notion. Here, the added baggage is Robin Hood himself, “draped in period trappings” and pushing against expectations, yet drained of vitality by the distance between external gesture and internal payoff.

Meanwhile, the source also flags another gothic revisionist mood shift, but from a different direction. Arturo and Roy Ambriz’s Gothic fairytale I Am Frankelda (Soy Frankelda) is described as technically advanced, mixed-medium, and inspired by classical artists plus filmmakers Guillermo del Toro and Henry Selick. It expands on the 2021 HBO Max series Frankelda’s Book Of Spooks, where the central theme was creative insecurity and rejection turning children into reluctant collaborators with monsters. The feature is a prequel, opens in 19th century Mexico with Francisca Imelda, who is later forced into chores by an unsympathetic grandmother, faces rejection from a sexist publisher, and finds Prince Herneval, a mythical winged figure who offers her a role in a realm that is running out of nightmares. In that story, the creative struggle is explicit, and the film is said to hide Easter eggs that reincorporate characters into her stories, including drawing from her grandmother. Read together, these two pieces tell the same industry truth in different fonts: aesthetic ambition is not the finish line, emotional clarity is.