Look, nobody asked Hugh Jackman to be sad about Robin Hood. And yet, here we are.
According to a review from Mashable, The Death of Robin Hood takes one of history's most beloved folk heroes - a fun-loving, rich-robbing, merry-man-leading legend - and puts him through what sounds like the cinematic equivalent of a damp Tuesday in February. Bleak. Brutal. And, the word nobody in a film production meeting wants to hear: boring.
The Wolverine problem
Jackman is unquestionably a magnetic screen presence. The man charmed his way through two decades of playing a feral mutant with metal bones, so you'd think "morally complex medieval outlaw" would be a cakewalk. But there's a big difference between "gritty reimagining" and "grimdark for the sake of grimdark," and this film apparently trips over that line pretty hard.
The review describes the film as a bleak re-imagining of the outlaw legend - which raises the obvious question: who exactly is this for? The Robin Hood cinematic universe (yes, there have been enough of them to call it that) already gave us Russell Crowe doing his best growling impression back in 2010 to mixed results. The lesson was right there, guys.
Robbing the audience of joy
There's something almost impressive about taking a character literally defined by swashbuckling charisma and fun, and draining all the oxygen out of him. Robin Hood is supposed to steal from the rich and give to the poor - not steal two hours of your life and give you an existential crisis.
To be fair, brutal and bleak can absolutely work. The Green Knight proved that medieval reimaginings can be weird, dark, and utterly compelling. But the "boring" part of Mashable's verdict is where this one seems to really fall apart. You can forgive a film for being grim. You cannot forgive it for making you check your phone.
The verdict
If you were hoping Jackman's post-Wolverine era would continue the momentum of his recent career resurgence, this one sounds like a speed bump rather than a victory lap. Sometimes an icon deserves a fresh, bold take. Sometimes they deserve to keep their merry men and just have a good time in the forest.
Apparently, nobody told the filmmakers that.
