Michael Sarnoski’s revisionist take on the outlaw legend strips away the swashbuckling and merriment audiences might expect, replacing it with a bleak, blood soaked meditation on guilt and mortality. Hugh Jackman plays an ageing, weathered Robin, still numb from decades of killing, while Jodie Comer’s Sister Brigid offers him an unlikely path towards redemption after he is gravely wounded. Bill Skarsgård and Noah Jupe round out a cast clearly committed to the film’s sombre vision.
A brutal opening, a slower middle
The first act delivers some of the most unflinching violence seen in a studio picture in years, immediately signalling that this is not a family friendly retelling. Once the initial carnage subsides, the film settles into a deliberately slow, dirge like pace that will test the patience of viewers expecting a conventional action epic. Jackman brings real gravitas to the role, balancing physical exhaustion with flashes of buried tenderness, and Comer matches him with a quiet, steely presence.
Handsome but uneven
Pat Scola’s 35mm cinematography lends the film a painterly quality, all natural light and textured costume work, even when the pacing drags. Sarnoski clearly wants to interrogate the morality behind Robin’s legend rather than celebrate it, and there is ambition in that choice, but the introspective approach never quite achieves the emotional punch of his earlier work. The result is a handsome, well acted film that admires its own seriousness a little too much, leaving it feeling like an interesting experiment rather than a fully realised reinvention.
