Hugh Jackman stars as the legendary folk hero in this understated and slow-paced character piece that takes some time to find its feet.
Sporting a vaguely Northern accent (I’d point to Yorkshire, meself, but I’m no dialect expert), an enormous grey beard and the world-weary eyes of a man well past his glory days, Jackman’s Robin Hood feels, by design, wholly detached from the myth we all know. For one, he’s an aged outlaw living on his own, divorced from his Merry Men (perhaps they packed it in after their rooftop concert at Camelot Castle) and pursued by echoes of his past. He may have killed some sheriff at one point or another (though I hear he spared the deputy) but he, himself, would admit that he was never the hero that the poems and songs made him out to be.
‘In truth, none were more wicked and wanton than the murderous bandit Robin Hood’
In his isolation, Robin is forever on the move, trekking through seemingly endless stretches of impressively misty moorlands and stoic mountains. His long list of past sins necessitates a virtually nomadic lifestyle, as he’s beset by all manner of people who want to kill him, not for money or for fame but to avenge their fathers and grandfathers who he slew along the way. Maybe they were innocent; maybe they weren’t, but all the same, generational memory and the idea of dutifully killing the man who murdered your kin as a means of evening the scales runs throughout The Death of Robin Hood as an increasingly interesting motif.
Though the band itself is no more, Robin’s still in touch with one member. Imagine that. Little John, now going by the name Edward (the mashing of John and Edward immediately brought two of The X Factor’s worst contestants right back to my mind) manages to track him down somehow and enlist his help in reclaiming his farm and rescuing his family from a group of brigands. Robin warns him that they will surely die in the attempt, but that all he longs for is a right death – a just way to cap off his turbulent life.
Given that initial framing, I was about ready to settle in for what looked like a two-hour rescue mission with all the rural vistas, bloody action (and glacial pacing) of something like The Northman, which managed to turn its own revenge story into something really dour and dull. This film kicks things off in a similar way (though not without some gritty fight scenes involving raging fires, helmeted warlords and grisly stabbings) before clearing the board completely in favour of something much more intriguing and ethereal.
Robin’s escapades bring him to the shores of a mysterious island to rest at the Priory of St. Clement, where Jodie Comer (who I know best from Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel of years past) watches over him with care. As Robin takes a new name and finds a new life for himself, so too does the film as a whole find a renewed sense of stability. The difference between the shadowy subterfuge of the first act and the sunny grasslands of the Priory in the second is quite literally night and day, and I was surprised by how well the film managed to make that change feel substantial and vivid without feeling like two completely different films bolted together.
From there, the story managed to keep me engaged in the central idea of Robin as a troubled man haunted by his misdeeds yet ultimately trying to better himself. Even without getting into the weeds of some of the other themes at play here, it’s quite easy to paint parallels between this story and Logan, which also saw a disenfranchised and older Jackman trying to set the past straight. As far as those beats are concerned, the story isn’t actually all that specific to the Robin Hood legend. If you changed the framing slightly and instead had Jackman play some kind of killer for hire with a bloody reputation, the narrative would remain virtually unchanged.
While I was able to appreciate the focus on the Robin that we see here, I couldn’t help but want the film to explore his status as a living legend in more detail. There are certainly efforts made to do so – there’s some talk, especially early on, about archery, Maid Marian and the concept of robbing from the rich, perhaps leftovers from another draft that fell to the cutting room floor – but the film could do with taking a firmer and more impassioned stance on the idea of generational storytelling, particularly in conversation with the themes of cyclical violence that are writ large here.
Such discussions could have also helped to alleviate how opaque some of the film’s secondary elements feel. There’s a plot thread about somebody’s cousin, played by Noah Jupe, who goes on his own journey of violence after an early brush with tragedy, but I couldn’t quite follow how and why his arc unfolded in the way that it did, and he’s absent for a good chunk of the narrative before reappearing with a different look and a renewed sense of determination that didn’t really feel earned. I just felt like that particular thread needed fleshed out more – I was able to appreciate his presence more as the film went on, but his inclusion was puzzling for the most part. Not everything needs to be explained – as a matter of fact, I quite like how understated some story beats are here – but the reluctance to properly give us in the audience enough to go by felt frustrating at times.
While I balked at the two-hour runtime and was apprehensive about Jackman’s accent in his first few scenes, neither of those became an issue to me. The film is without a doubt pitched at a slow pace which won’t suit everyone (just ask the bloke in the second row whose snoring managed to funnily underpin a fair dose of the quieter scenes) but I genuinely didn’t feel that bloat.
That’s a testament to a lot of things – the design, which feels believably medieval and the nicely folky, fiddle-centric score – but Jackman’s characterisation is surely chief among them. He’s a reliably likeable presence, but I just found myself far more interested in his portrayal than I thought I would. Given what I’ve said, the film as a whole feels less like a vessel for Jackman to be Robin Hood as it does a story about an old dog trying to learn new tricks, which lets this fare better than when other big-name actors have worn the tights. While I’d have really liked to get more into the weeds of why these legendary heroes exist in our culture, which the film does flirt with the idea of, I was surprisingly on-board with the journey at play here all the same.
BBFC: Rated 15 for strong bloody violence, injury detail.
The Death of Robin Hood is in cinemas now.
