Film Review: The Death of Robin Hood 羅賓漢之死 (2026) - USA
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critics Circle of Australia)
I rated it 8/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★
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There comes a moment in every legend when the stories grow larger than the man who inspired them. Michael Sarnoski’s The Death of Robin Hood begins long after that moment has passed. Hugh Jackman’s Robin is not the merry outlaw of childhood memory or the dashing rebel of countless films. He is a gray, weather-beaten figure living like a wounded animal in the wilderness, haunted by the bodies he left behind and the songs that turned those bodies into heroism.
Sarnoski, who previously gave us the quiet heartbreak of Pig and the controlled dread of A Quiet Place: Day One, approaches the old English ballad with the same unsentimental clarity. He is less interested in arrows and clever escapes than in the slow corrosion of a life spent taking. The film’s violence arrives early and without romance. It is ugly, sudden, and necessary to the story Sarnoski wants to tell: that the man who becomes a folk hero is often the one least able to live with what the stories leave out.
Jackman has always been capable of charm, but here he digs into something harder and more interesting. His Robin is exhausted by his own myth. The performance has the same lived-in gravity he brought to Logan, another aging warrior trying to outrun the legend he created. You watch him and feel the weight of years spent sleeping with one eye open, of hands that have forgotten how to do anything but kill. It is some of the best work he has done in years.
Jodie Comer, as the prioress who takes him in, matches him with a performance of quiet authority and carefully banked feeling. Their scenes together are the heart of the film—two damaged people recognizing something in each other without the need for speeches. Bill Skarsgård’s Little John is a different kind of revelation: less the loyal giant of legend than a man who has tried, and mostly failed, to leave the old life behind. The supporting players, including Murray Bartlett in a role that deepens as the film unfolds, all seem to understand that this is not a movie about heroes. It is a movie about the cost of becoming one in other people’s mouths.
Sarnoski films the English (or rather Northern Irish) landscape with a painter’s eye for mud, mist, and the particular loneliness of open country. The camera does not glamorize the violence, nor does it look away from it. When the film turns quieter in its second half, the change of pace feels earned rather than imposed. We are watching a man confront the difference between the stories told about him and the life he actually lived. That confrontation is more gripping than any archery contest.
The ending, drawn from the ancient ballad but reshaped with modern psychological precision, will not satisfy everyone. It is quiet, almost clinical, and deeply sad. I found it honest. Legends rarely end with fanfare. More often they end in a room, with the people who know the truth and the people who prefer the lie.
The Death of Robin Hood is not a rousing adventure. It is something rarer: a thoughtful, bruising meditation on how stories both save and destroy us. Sarnoski and Jackman have made a film that respects the old ballad while refusing to be comforted by it. That refusal is what gives the movie its power.
I walked out thinking about the stories we tell ourselves, and the ones we tell about others. Some of them are necessary. Most of them are incomplete. This film understands that, and it does not look away. (Neo, 2026)