Hugh Jackman and the twilight of Robin Hood

What else can be said about Robin Hood? From Kevin Costner to Russell Crowe, from Errol Flynn to Sean Connery, or from Disney's fox to Mel Brooks' parody, the legendary outlaw of Sherwood Forest has had so many lives that it's hard to find anything new in him. Perhaps that's why filmmaker Michael Sarnoski's reinterpretation with The Death of Robin Hood is irredeemably twilight. The director of Pig (2021) and A Quiet Place: Day One (2024) demythifies the hero and makes the character, in an advanced stage of his life, question his past: "I told lies so that the foolish would follow me into the darkness," he says at one point in the film. Sarnoski explores Robin Hood's guilt through a narrative that succeeds in reflecting on the ambiguity between truth and falsehood in tales of popular heroism, with a committed Hugh Jackman but with a tone too close to what he already played in James Mangold's Logan (2017). The film's gamble is, in any case, brave: the action (raw, ultraviolent) only takes place at the beginning, before giving way to a more intimate story in a sanatorium where the character arrives badly wounded. Sarnoski points to a false illusion of atonement when he hints at the possibility of a shared life between the protagonist, the prioress played by Jodie Comer, and Little John's daughter, but he doesn't manage to develop the idea beyond certain conventionalisms. The film is in large part disruptive, but also pompous and solemn.