Hugh Jackman and Michael Sarnoski Cosplay Legends in ‘The Death of Robin Hood’
Some directors really are far too enamored with their so-called murderous monsters to be truly critical of them. And the timing is especially bad for The Death of Robin Hood, whose release comes at a time when the least we want for the rich is taxation. But it gets downright abysmal when the movie doesn’t seek to deconstruct the myth of its so-called hero so much as blow it to smithereens.
The disdain it has for those who would believe in a man who would rob the rich and give to the vulnerable and needy is indeed profound, so much so that the first person who espouses it is given a bloody death in this windswept, appropriately frozen medieval time. Yes, it is literally a cold world, and the violence is more repugnant for being portrayed as a fully justified act of self defense.
There’s also not much mercy to speak of even for the women who would serve as angels of healing for the wounded men at the center of this dully repetitive narrative. Sexuality may not exactly be one of this movie’s many pressure points, but the act of sex is, since even those aforementioned angels seem to incur certain doom if they get physical.
Yet the movie demands a love interest, and balances out that requirement with the presence of Little Margaret (Faith Delaney) the daughter of Robin’s (Hugh Jackman) former right hand man, who just happens to perish and leave his former companion in bloodshed ready to be redeemed by a cute kid. Once Robin and Margaret settle into a priory run by Sister Brigid (Jodie Comer), they are truly a Hollywood found family, with the picture completed by a grizzled Jackman, adorable kid, and much younger woman who might as well be the angel of the house, with just enough sexuality to ensure her lack of frigidity.
A24
Come to think of it, there never seems to be a chill in this idyllic house of worship (which is an island in more ways than one) that also functions as a convalescent home for Robin, whose injury renders him vulnerable to Brigid and the other saintlike denizens. The place is bursting with vegetation in a natural setting which always seems to be in the midst of spring, and choreographer Pat Scola, who lit up the gritty settings of We Grown Now, Sing Sing, and writer-director Michael Sarnoski’s previous film Pig, makes a piously enchanting case for the beauty of religion saving us…or at least the lost but found souls it deems worthy.
But not even Hugh Jackman, who put another long-standing cultural legacy to rest (well, kinda), can’t make aged and exhausted fit right here. Not with this movie’s fundamental misunderstanding of legends, how they come to be, and why they last. Like The Northman, The Death of Robin Hood tries to justify its toxicity by making the far off future female, but the movie keeps it strictly to the surface, cosplaying philosophy and redemption the way his Nicolas Cage cosplayed poverty in Pig.
It is by no means impossible to engage with violence and criticize it. No one would dare deny the glory of Toshiro Mifune in Yojimbo, but he earned the right to advise a long life eating gruel, whatever his own bad example. But how is it possible to take any contemplation of violence seriously when it earns one a legend that lives through centuries and a dignified final stretch?
Rating: D
