When Robin Hood Dies: Hugh Jackman’s Dark New Take

This isn’t the Robin Hood you learned about in school. It is slower. Meaner. Older. Michael Sarnoski takes the familiar ballad of the 17th century and strips it down to something raw and elegiac, a film that watches a legend unmake itself as much as it reinvents him.

Hugh Jackman plays an aged Robin Hood who returns to the world after a savage wound dealt by a mysterious woman. Around him orbit Jodie Comer, Bill Skarsgård, Murray Bartlett, and Noah Jupe, each adding weight to a story that prefers bruises and silences over heroics. Sarnoski, whose voice was first loudly felt in Pig, leans into atmosphere and moral abrasion rather than broad strokes of mythic adventure.

Critics have responded with mixed but generally favorable notes. On Rotten Tomatoes the film sits at 71 percent from 28 reviews; Metacritic aggregates a score of 63 out of 100 based on 16 critics. Those numbers tell a story of a movie that divides opinion: admired for craft, questioned for emotional reach.

Some critics hear a daring re-examination. For The Film Stage, Dan Mecca awarded an 83, arguing that few recent films have offered such a lucid, meta reading of the Robin Hood corpus since Richard Lester's underrated Robin and Marian. There is a sense here of an attempt to interrogate the legend itself, to ask what survives when the costume is peeled away.

IndieWire's Dan Erlich, scoring the picture 75, sees it as less a corrective chronicle and more an act of corrective storytelling. The film leans into imagination over strict historicity, and Sarnoski's economical choices aim to cross a millennium of myth, even if that ambition sometimes yields a story that feels stubbornly difficult to accept.

Variety's Guy Lodge and IGN's Jim Vejvoda both landed around 70, praising the movie's fierce reinvention, its visceral worldbuilding, and a sincere attention to spiritual and psychological stakes rarely granted to big-name properties. They note that the film's slowed rhythms and quiet intensity make it closer in spirit to Sarnoski's earlier work than to sprawling IP-driven spectacle.

Not everyone was convinced. The A.V. Club's Jacob Oller, at 50, found the film drifting toward the end, saying that without a gripping narrative core or emotional payoff the piece risks becoming as thin as the legends it chews over. Frank Scheck of The Hollywood Reporter, giving a harsher 40, praised the atmosphere but argued that the dour, repetitive images and the film's grim reinterpretation never quite reach the depths they aim for.

So where does that leave viewers? If you love mood, risk, and a version of Robin Hood that asks painful questions about violence, culpability, and memory, this film will reward patience and attention. If you want straightforward mythic catharsis or a fast-paced retelling, this is not the treasure chest you came for. Either way, Sarnoski has forced the familiar into a conversation it rarely has: what does a legend owe the truth, and what does it lose when it gets one?

Expect to leave the theater unsettled, and to find the image of an older, wounded outlaw lingering long after the credits roll.