A24 is on a heater right now, which makes a movie like The Death of Robin Hood feel especially interesting. Not because it was ever going to be some giant crowd-pleasing smash, but because this is the kind of project that can only happen when a studio has enough momentum to bankroll something weird, grim, and a little hostile to the audience.
And to be clear: this movie is hostile.
That is not automatically a bad thing.
Michael Sarnoski’s take on Robin Hood is not interested in the swashbuckling fantasy version people grew up with, and it definitely is not interested in the romantic Kevin Costner template that lodged itself in pop culture years ago. This is a deconstruction, full stop. The question here is basically: what if Robin Hood was not some noble rogue with a charming anti-authority streak, but a violent man who liked robbing and killing a little too much? What if age, injury, and isolation finally forced him to sit still long enough to think about the blood trail behind him?
That is a strong premise. For a while, the movie absolutely has me.
What works
The best thing The Death of Robin Hood has going for it is tone.
This movie is drenched in a bleak, almost nihilistic misery that gives it real texture. Everyone looks tired. Everything feels contaminated by old violence. Even the quieter scenes carry the sense that something rotten happened here long before the camera arrived. Sarnoski is not trying to make death cool, and that alone separates this from a lot of modern prestige slop that wants brutality without the discomfort.
When people die here, it is ugly. It is abrupt. It is hard to watch. That sounds like a weird compliment, but it matters. Movies cheat this all the time. They give us violence as punctuation, then move on before we have to sit with it. The Death of Robin Hood at least understands that watching a person die should feel wrong. There is weight to it. There is revulsion to it. The movie earns points for that.
Hugh Jackman also does exactly what you would hope Hugh Jackman would do. He clocks in and gives the material seriousness. This version of Robin Hood is basically the burned-out end state of a myth, and Jackman plays him like a man who has spent too many years mistaking appetite for purpose. He is exhausted, dangerous, and not especially lovable. That matters because the movie is not giving him the usual antihero protections. This is not the “he breaks the rules, but he has a heart of gold” version. This guy is just an animal in expensive legend packaging.
Jodie Comer is good too, even though the script does not give her enough to do. She brings warmth and intelligence to a character who could have easily been reduced to “moral refuge for broken man.” There are moments where you can feel a more complicated movie trying to break through in her scenes, one where Robin’s presence creates a real ethical and emotional dilemma instead of just a place for him to convalesce and brood.
For about the first hour, that is enough. The film builds a strong atmosphere, sells the physical danger, and sets up the moral idea cleanly: Robin has wronged people, those people have families, and violence keeps reproducing itself. Kill one man, then his brother comes. Kill the brother, then his son comes. Where does that cycle stop? That is a real hook.
Where it loses me
The problem is that the movie mistakes slowdown for depth.
A slow burn only works if the payoff justifies the patience. If it doesn’t, “slow burn” becomes the polite phrase critics use when they don’t want to say the second half dragged like a corpse through mud. That is where this movie lands for me.
Once Robin is wounded and tucked away in the monastery, the film shifts from grim momentum into reflection mode. Fine. I did not need more action. I was not sitting there asking for a dozen extra sword fights. What I needed was emotional payoff. I needed the consequences of this man’s life to close in on him in a way that felt specific, earned, and hard to dodge.
Instead, the movie keeps circling the idea of reckoning without really delivering one.
There are character moments that work. There are flashes of tenderness, guilt, and self-recognition. But the script never fully commits to the tension it sets up. The people Robin hurt never become as dramatically present as they need to be. The moral dilemma never sharpens enough. The redemption angle never stops feeling a little abstract.
That leaves the second half in a frustrating place. It wants me to feel the emotional weight of a man confronting his sins, but I needed more than mood and suggestion. I needed the movie to press harder.
The Robin Hood problem
Here is the bigger issue: as a deconstruction of Robin Hood, this only half works.
The movie is leaning hard on the audience’s existing relationship to the legend. That is the trick. You hear “Robin Hood,” and your brain supplies all the mythology automatically: the outlaw hero, the merry men, the anti-corrupt nobleman energy, the folklore gloss. Then the movie comes in and says, no, what if that whole myth was hiding a much uglier man underneath?
In theory, that is interesting.
In practice, it starts to feel a little gimmicky.
Because the film does not spend enough time engaging with the actual Robin Hood world, the Robin Hood label starts doing work the screenplay itself has not fully earned. It is as if the movie wants the cultural weight of the name without doing enough with the specific baggage attached to it. Strip the title away and parts of this play like a generic medieval guilt drama about an aging killer hiding in isolation.
That would be fine if the emotional landing were devastating. Then the title would feel like a sharp reframing device. But because the landing is soft, the Robin Hood framing feels more like an attention-grabbing wrapper around a story that is more interesting as a concept than as a finished movie.
Critic bait, or just unfinished?
This is one of those movies that made me think, halfway through, “Was this built in a lab to make critics nod thoughtfully?”
I do not mean that as a full dismissal. There is real craft here. There are strong performances. There is conviction in the ugliness. Sarnoski clearly knows what kind of movie he wanted to make.
But there is also a familiar prestige-cinema problem on display: a film can be serious, slow, and morally gray without actually becoming profound. Sometimes a movie just puts on the clothes of importance and hopes that mood will close the gap. The Death of Robin Hood gets close to that line. I do not think it crosses all the way into fraud territory, but it absolutely flirts with it.
That is what makes the movie frustrating instead of simply bad. There is enough here to see the better version of it.
Final take
I cannot call The Death of Robin Hood a failure, because the first half is too strong and the performances are too committed for that. But I also cannot say it really lands.
It has grit. It has conviction. It has an ugly moral pulse that I respect. It also has a second half that goes from deliberate to inert, and a redemption arc that never fully convinced me this particular version of Robin Hood had earned the movie’s interest in saving him.
So my verdict is pretty simple: wait for streaming.
Watch it for the atmosphere, the brutality, and Hugh Jackman doing real work. Just do not go in expecting the emotional payoff to match the premise. The movie asks a good question. It just never comes up with an answer sharp enough to justify the whole trip.
If you have seen The Death of Robin Hood, I want to know where you landed on it. Did the deconstruction work for you, or did it feel like the movie was borrowing the Robin Hood name to fake extra depth?
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