Gunmetal gray sky, barren muddy terrain, a half-starved child begging a wizened title character for a scrap of food moments before he slashes her throat. It's hardly the opening you imagine for a film about a folk hero — especially one who robs the rich and gives to the poor. But then, The Death of Robin Hood is the brainchild of Michael Sarnoski (Pig, A Quiet Place: Day One), so maybe leave expectations in the lobby.
Sarnoski gives us Hugh Jackman's battle-scarred, gray-bearded Robin as a tormented wretch, not the brash strapping outlaw of legend — alone, wracked by regret over the countless lives he's ended or ruined. When we meet Robin in 1247 A.D., he seems pursued as much by his own guilt as by avenging relatives of the innocents he murdered in younger days (say, that half-starved but surreptitiously knife-clutching little girl).
So he tries to beg off when Little John (Bill Skarsgård, unrecognizable) approaches him with the promise of one more "adventure" — to rescue the wife John's claimed after killing her husband, from the neighbors who then rescued her from John. Robin notes correctly that she's not really John's wife, yet he reluctantly brings his quiver, and an arm that can still shoot an arrow through a skull and out an eye socket at 50 paces.
He proves formidable, but not immortal. This "adventure" leaves him gravely wounded, dragged across forbidding terrain to a remote, cliff-top convent, where a prioress (Jodie Comer) with a curative touch and a marginally gentler way with a knife will attempt to bleed him back to health.
Sarnoski's indie-realist approach to blood-letting — whether Pitt-ishly clinical, or Game of Thrones-esque in its brutality — is never less than arresting, and Jackman's certainly up for the gore, extinguishing his torch in one opponent's mouth and burying a hatchet in another's back.
But it's in the film's later stages, where the character grapples with what his youthful righting of wrongs has cost both him and bystanders, that the actor and this medieval thriller find their emotional footing. Sarnoski is exploring the way we edit and augment the tales we tell about ourselves as we pass through the world, noting that hedges and embellishments will ultimately be laid bare.
If we live long enough, we'll face a reckoning, a lesson Jackman's delivered before as Logan, another troubled figure of legend. This film's latter moments have a similarly eulogistic quality, augmented by Comer's affecting turn as an accepting if anguished guardian at the hour when life ends, and myth takes flight.
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