The Death of Robin Hood Review: Hugh Jackman's Unforgiven Without the Pulse
About ninety minutes in I checked how much was left. That’s the honest version of this review. The rest is me trying to work out why, because the idea underneath this film is good enough that it should have worked.
Here’s the idea. Robin Hood was never the man in the ballads. He robbed and he killed and he was very good at it, and then he lived long enough to hear children sing songs about a version of himself that never existed. Michael Sarnoski takes that gap between the man and the myth and puts an old, grey, half-dead Hugh Jackman in the middle of it. Little John, played by Bill Skarsgård as a genuine bandit rather than a jolly sidekick, talks him into one more job. It goes badly. Robin gets beaten close to death in a battlefield brawl and wakes up in a priory in the care of Sister Brigid, who is Jodie Comer being patient and unnervingly kind. From there it’s a slow walk toward whether a man like that gets to be forgiven, and by whom, and whether he even wants it.
Read that back. It’s a great pitch. It’s also Unforgiven.
Unforgiven earned the misery. This doesn’t.
I don’t think the resemblance is a problem by itself. Eastwood didn’t invent the aging killer confronting his own press clippings, and Robin Hood’s death has been a downbeat story since the ballad. The problem is that Unforgiven is the exact film that shows you what’s missing here.
Unforgiven works because it never stops being a western while it’s dismantling the western. There’s a bounty. There’s a posse. There’s a sheriff who beats people in the street and a friend who won’t make it and a kid who lies about how many men he’s shot. Every scene has somebody who wants something and is moving to get it. The bleakness rides on top of a story that functions, and by the time the film turns the myth inside out you’ve been leaning forward for two hours. Munny’s collapse lands because you watched him hold it together.
Sarnoski keeps the corrosion and throws out the machinery. There’s no plot engine in this thing. Robin is wounded early and spends most of the film in bed, in mist, in mud, being tended to and talked at. People arrive to represent something. A girl whose father died in the battle. A one-eyed boy who wants revenge. A leper who says philosophical things about suffering. They aren’t characters so much as stations Robin passes through on his way to feeling slightly better about himself. The film keeps telling you it’s about a man reckoning with what he was, but reckoning is an action and nobody here does very much.
And it’s long. Two hours and three minutes of a man dying slowly, shot in beautiful 35mm grain in Northern Ireland, every frame drained to grey and brown. Gorgeous stuff. Also completely undifferentiated. Take any ten minutes from the middle hour and you couldn’t tell me whether they came at the forty minute mark or the ninety.
What’s actually good in here
Jackman is good. That needs saying, because it isn’t his fault. Under the yeti beard he’s playing exhaustion rather than gravitas, and there are two or three moments, mostly small ones, where you see a man who is genuinely frightened of what he’ll find if he looks back. Give him a script with a spine and this performance is the one people talk about at the end of the year.
Comer does more with Brigid than the writing gives her. Skarsgård is in the film too little. Pat Scola’s photography is the only element that fully delivers on the ambition, and the fights, when they come, are ugly and close and hurt to watch in the right way.
The numbers say I’m not alone. Six million worldwide against a twenty million budget, critics at 66 percent, audiences at 56. Critics respected the attempt. Everyone else looked at their phone.
The version I wanted
There’s a real film in here about a man who has to live inside a legend he knows is a lie, and about the people who need that legend more than they need the truth about him. That film has scenes where somebody confronts Robin with the story and he has to decide whether to correct them. It has consequences. It probably has Little John in more than four scenes.
Instead we got the mood board. Beautiful, sincere, deeply felt, and inert.
The premise deserved a pulse.