The Death of Robin Hood review – Hugh Jackman darkens a heroic tale in grim drama

A conceptually intriguing film that turns the outlaw hero into a selfish criminal struggles to find its footing despite some fantastic craftwork

S poiler: Robin Hood is going to die. In bluntly titled drama The Death of Robin Hood, that might be exactly what one is programmed to expect but, in this often intriguing revisionist tale, it’s what he leaves behind that might be more of a shock.

With the gap between the ultra-rich and the rest of us continuing to expand at a riot-inducing pace (we now have our first trillionaire – congrats!), it would be tempting to use a folk hero of the past as a rousing symbol of what many of us would like to see in the present. But in writer-director Michael Sarnoski’s darker, grubbier take, Robin Hood takes from anyone and keeps it for himself, despite what the legend might say. In fact, as played by a dour Hugh Jackman , he’s plagued by stories told by fireside, painting him as someone to be heralded, and it’s only those whose lives he’s touched that know the truth, if they were lucky enough to survive. He’s then an outlaw running not just from the authorities, but from the aggrieved fathers and brothers who want to avenge what he ripped away from them.

In an effectively jolting opener, Robin is discovered in the wilderness by a drifter (played by the consistently transfixing Welsh actor Jade Croot, of Rabbit Trap and Sacrifice) who finds out the hard way that he is not someone to be crossed. A reunion with his old friend Little John (Bill Skarsgård) and an agreement to help protect what’s his then leads to a violent showdown, and Robin’s injuries send him to a remote priory, where prioress Brigid ( Jodie Comer ) will nurse him back to health, identity unknown. But how do you accept unconditional goodness when all you’ve known is the opposite?

Jackman, with a mostly acceptable if a little undefined “northern” accent, is comfortably in grizzled Logan mode again, and even gets a young girl to mentor, his one-time friend John’s daughter (Faith Delaney) eager to learn bow skills from him. Our expectations lead us to predict that Robin’s past will come back to haunt him and bring chaos to the tranquil of his new home but, despite showing early action movie skill with some astonishingly gory fight scenes reminiscent of The Northman, Sarnoski defiantly denies us this. Like a lot of the choices made by Sarnoski, it’s a conceptually interesting one (front-loading the trailer-friendly action then denying us any more of it), but one that proves a little frustrating in practice. Perhaps the switch to meditative character drama would have been more effective if we had more to know about Robin or Brigid. But too much is left unsaid and so too little is felt by us, a remove that slowly expands into a hole at the story’s centre. Comer is as instinctive and luminous as ever, but she’s given a sliver of a character to embody and both herself, and a mostly obscured Murray Bartlett as a man with leprosy, are saddled with speeches ambitiously aiming for profundity but never quite getting there.

Sarnoski tries steering us toward somewhere similar to where Martin Scorsese took us in The Irishman, a stark reminder that the life of a criminal rarely ends in a blaze of glory but in a sad and lonely place filled with waste and regret, a finger wag at those of us waiting for something juicier. But what Scorsese achieved so brilliantly, with his bluntly pathetic ending, Sarnoski loses his grip on, trying to engineer a makeshift family for Robin and insisting we find the tragic humanity in his final days and choices, desperately squeezing tears that’ll never fall. For a slow – and often ponderously uneventful – film, the ending also feels strangely rushed, decisions and reveals not explored enough for them to really land in the way that’s clearly intended (there’s a potentially more satisfying psychological thriller using the same ingredients).

There’s really impressive craft here, though, Sarnoski a skilled transporter, making the most of the natural sounds and textures of the setting – Belfast and the area surrounding standing in for Cumbria (a character mentions Keswick as being close-by). He has proven himself to be a thoughtful film-maker, one who found real humanity in both a Nicolas Cage movie (Pig) and a Quiet Place sequel (A Quiet Place: Day One) – but he’s yet to elevate good to great, and the unsureness of tone here, the film stuck somewhere between epic and chamberpiece, makes it another valiant, if ultimately unsuccessful, attempt. Greatness will one day surely come.

The Death of Robin Hood is out in Australian cinemas on 18 June, US cinemas on 19 June and in the UK on 3 September