The Death of Robin Hood (2026) Review: Brutal but Strangely Dull

Spoilers for the ending of The Death of Robin Hood and The Uprising follow.

I was ready for The Death of Robin Hood to have a completely new perspective on the legend. After The Uprising used Robin Hood as a comforting relief to rebellion, I liked the prospect of a film that would ask what such a hero might actually have done to the people in his path. Michael Sarnoski opens with a man whose body and conscience have been worn down by violence. Hugh Jackman looks capable of terrible things and tired of having done them. For a while, I thought the film would follow that exhaustion somewhere dangerous. Instead, its energy drains away so thoroughly that this remarkably violent Robin Hood film ends up surprisingly dull.

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In the film, Robin is gravely wounded after a life of crime and killing, and a mysterious woman offers him a chance at salvation. That premise reverses the usual moral arrangement. The famous name doesn’t absolve Robin of his sins, and being remembered as a hero doesn’t mean he behaved like one. Jackman makes that separation convincing. He gives Robin Hood a physical presence marked by endless violence.

The early brutality also makes redemption harder than a change of heart. Feeling remorse is something Robin can do for himself. The people he’s hurt cannot recover just because he’s finally learned to suffer over it. Sarnoski examines the gap between repentance and repair, and I wanted to sit with that question. A folk hero makes an especially good subject for it. In The Ugly Stepsister, revisiting an old story gives someone pushed to its margins a life of her own. Here, the people Robin hurt stay largely outside our view. Legends can preserve the memory of resistance while tidying away the acts that made a man feared in his own time.

Then Robin’s last journey settles into a prolonged reckoning with what we already know. I can see why the film slows down after the violence. A dying man ought to have time to face himself. But stillness needs pressure to move forward. A quiet conversation or memory should complicate our understanding of what he did and what he might yet owe. Too often, the film returns to the same burden of guilt with little change in its meaning. I stopped wondering what Robin would discover and started waiting for the film to reach its titular conclusion.

That’s where the running time began to weigh on me. The violence remains startling whenever it breaks through, but a shocking injury cannot supply momentum to the long stretches between shocks. The film wants brutality and reflection to deepen one another. For me, they often sit side by side. We have the visceral proof that Robin has lived by the sword, followed by another solemn reminder that the sword has damaged his soul. Once I understood the argument, the film kept making it over and over again.

Jackman resists the easy charm that could turn this Robin into a lovable scoundrel, and Jodie Comer brings a steadiness to the scenes that might otherwise collapse under their own seriousness. The cast gives the film human texture even when its pace flattens. I also admire Sarnoski’s willingness to let the landscape feel exposed and inhospitable. There are images here that deserve a more searching story around them.

And so the comparison between The Uprising and The Death of Robin Hood goes on. In The Uprising, a revolt involving ordinary people narrows into a Robin Hood origin story. The poor spend much of the film hurting one another, the powerful escape its harshest scrutiny, and one exceptional outlaw becomes a safer vessel for the anger. The legend arrives as a retreat from collective politics. Here, Sarnoski begins with the exceptional outlaw and strips away the moral protection of the legend. He refuses to treat the name Robin Hood as proof of virtue.

That is the more interesting starting point, but it leads to another narrow view. The Death of Robin Hood concentrates on whether this man can live with himself and whether mercy can reach him. The Uprising asks us to distrust the violence of the many; this film asks us to grieve the violence of the one. Neither spends enough time with the people whose lives are supposed to give the Robin Hood story meaning. Strike shows how much a film can gain when a collective struggle cannot be handed to one hero. What becomes of those Robin claimed to defend? What would justice require beyond the state of his conscience? The questions remain at the edge of a film devoted to his personal salvation.

I don’t need every Robin Hood adaptation to function as a manifesto. There’s a semi-worthwhile story in the death of a violent man, even if his politics are never restored to him. But the choice to use this particular legend invites a wider reckoning. Robin Hood’s appeal lies in the fantasy that wealth and power can be challenged on behalf of people who have neither. Sarnoski punctures the fantasy of the innocent outlaw, yet does not give the world around him comparable attention. Once the myth has been pulled apart, the film mostly studies the pieces in Robin’s hands.

I came away admiring parts of The Death of Robin Hood more than I enjoyed watching it. Its opening is ugly and arresting, and its central question about redemption piqued my interest. But the middle stretches that question thin instead of pushing it further. The Uprising turned Robin Hood into an escape from the politics of revolt. This film turns him into a private moral reckoning and then lingers there until even the blood begins to feel strangely inert.

The Death of Robin Hood (2026) Rating: ★★1/2 out of 5

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