THE DEATH OF ROBIN HOOD

Name: THE DEATH OF ROBIN HOOD
Item: THE DEATH OF ROBIN HOOD
Author: Leigh Hewett

"Marred by Violence and an Abhorrent Ending"

Family Content: -3 Excessive sex, violence, immorality, and/or worldview problems. (Sometimes excessive content such as violence is in otherwise redemptive movies.)

Entertainment Quality:

	None	Light	Moderate	Heavy
Language
Violence
Sex
Nudity

Credits →

What You Need To Know:

THE DEATH OF ROBIN HOOD is a violent medieval drama where Robin Hood is not the heroic legend who stops the high taxing treacherous tyrant Prince John. In this movie, Robin Hood is a vicious, murderous outlaw with many enemies. Robin goes to help his friend, Little John, stop his wife’s angry relatives. However, he ends up severely wounded at a rural nunnery, where the prioress, Sister Bridget, is a healer with a tragic past.

The first half of THE DEATH OF ROBIN HOOD is super violent as Robin brutally fends off Little John’s enemies. Happily, the movie’s second half is more uplifting as Robin befriends Sister Bridget and becomes a fatherly figure to Little John’s orphaned daughter, Margaret. Everything seems to be going fine when a sudden unexplained twist leads to a fulfillment of the movie’s title. THE DEATH OF ROBIN HOOD doesn’t endorse Robin’s murderous actions, but it does show their bloody brutality in the movie’s first half. Also, the ending implicitly promotes physician-assisted suicide. So, MOVIEGUIDE® rates THE DEATH OF ROBIN HOOD as excessive and unacceptable.

Content:

(CC, BB, FRFR, AbAb, VVV, MM):

Dominant Worldview and Other Worldview Content/Elements:

Strong Christian, moral worldview in the movie’s second half with positive references to Jesus Christ, Scripture and prayer (including woman quotes from John 14:2 and 3 where Jesus says, “My father’s house has many rooms” and “I am going there to prepare a place for you”) where a great and murderous sinner starts to find some redemption from his sins and relief from his guilt by becoming friends with a nun and by becoming a caring mentor to an orphaned girl, but the ending implicitly promotes physician-assisted suicide, though it’s in the context of taking responsibility for your sins as you get closer to death

Foul Language:

No foul language

Violence:

Very strong violence as medieval title character slits the throat of young female assassin, a man stabs a woman hostage brutally before her husband can save her, people are clubbed and stabbed and shot with arrows, title character appears to rip off a man’s jaw when the man’s down on the ground, arrow pierces teenage boy’s skull from behind, and he falls into a stream, but he’s later seen stumbling home, and viewers can see the arrow has pierced the boy’s right eye (boy dies), a young man’s cheek near his left eye has to be sewn up, and he wears an eyepatch, title character kills a wild boar and guts it and dresses it for eating so its entrails are shown, a healer uses bloodletting to heal a patient, the procedure is later used for someone to commit suicide, a character tells a terrible story of a man dying in a fire while trying to protect his children from the deadly blaze but failing, and a leper’s deformed face is revealed as he’s lying on his deathbed

Sex:

No sex

Nudity:

No nudity

Alcohol Use:

No alcohol use

Smoking and/or Drug Use and Abuse:

No smoking or drugs; and,

Miscellaneous Immorality:

Revenge, past banditry is mentioned but left vague, murderous outlaw hides his identity and goes by another name, and another murderous outlaw has also changed his name.

More Detail:

THE DEATH OF ROBIN HOOD is a violent medieval drama where Robin Hood is not the heroic legend who stops the high taxing treacherous tyrant Prince John from oppressing Saxon farmers and businessmen, but is a vicious outlaw who helps his friend, Little John, stop his wife’s angry relatives, then ends up severely wounded at a rural nunnery, where the prioress, Sister Bridget, is a healer with a tragic past. The first half of THE DEATH OF ROBIN HOOD is super violent as Robin brutally fends off Little John’s enemies, and the second half is more uplifting as Robin befriends Sister Bridget and becomes a fatherly figure to Little John’s orphaned daughter, but the ending promotes physician assisted suicide.

The movie stars Hugh Jackman as Robin, with a graying beard and long hair. It opens with Robin killing a young woman who tries to assassinate him for some reason. Before he kills her, he denies that he’s a hero but is a murderous outlaw.

Robin’s old friend, Little John, comes to Robin. He says he needs Robin’s help to fend off some angry relatives of his wife’s. John confesses that he actually stole his wife from another man, but now he and the woman have a young daughter. However, when they arrive at John’s place, the relatives have already taken over the farm. Then, when Robin and John storm the farmhouse, a man grabs John’s wife as hostage, then brutally stabs her to death. Robin and an aggrieved John dispatch the invader’s, but one teenage boy escapes in a river, although Robin manages to hit the boy in the head from behind with an arrow from Robins bow.

Cut to the boy staggering home. The arrow has pierced his head and right eye. Though still alive, he dies. His father then leads a posse to go after Robin and John.

The father catches up with Robin after Robin and John, with his daughter, part. The fight between Robin and the father is brutal. The father gets the best of Robin. However, just before he deals the fatal blow, John comes behind and kills him.

A badly wounded Robin is carried to a rural nunnery led by a prioress named Sister Bridget, who’s a renowned healer. When he wakes, Robin hides his identity, calling himself Randolph. He slowly heals, with Sister Bridget helping him to learn how to strengthen a broken leg. At one point, John’s daughter comes to the nunnery, saying that some men killed her father on the road. Robin never learned her name, so he calls her Margaret, after her mother.

As Robin heals, he becomes a father figure to Margaret, who slowly breaks out of her shell. Robin also starts to regret his life of murder and crime. However, Sister Bridget has a tragic past that will affect Robin’s self-identity and his relationship with her.

The first half of THE DEATH OF ROBIN HOOD is super violent as he fends off Little John’s enemies. However, the second half is more uplifting as Robin befriends Sister Bridget and becomes a fatherly figure to Little John’s orphaned daughter. Everything seems to be going fine when a sudden unexplained twist leads to a fulfillment of the movie’s title.

THE DEATH OF ROBIN HOOD is based on two anonymous ballads, one from the 17th Century and one from the 18th Century. In both cases, however, Robin Hood is still a heroic legend. That’s not true of this movie. Here, Robin Hood admits he’s a murderous outlaw and denies all but one of the positive legends about himself.

THE DEATH OF ROBIN HOOD doesn’t endorse Robin’s murderous actions, but it does show their bloody brutality in the movie’s first half. Also, the ending implicitly appears to promote physician-assisted suicide. The movie is much better and more touching when it shows Robin Hood trying to redeem himself in the eyes of Sister Bridget and little Margaret. So, MOVIEGUIDE® rates THE DEATH OF ROBIN HOOD as excessive and unacceptable.

MOVIEGUIDE® strongly opposes the attempt by so many filmmakers these days to apply Marxist revisionist history to our national heroes and legendary figures like Robin Hood. Hollywood started doing this in the late 1960s and the 1970s and saw their earnings plummet. It turned this around in the late 1970s with such movies as STAR WARS, ROCKY and SUPERMAN, and experienced another turnaround in the early 2000s with animated movies like FINDING NEMO and THE INCREDIBLES, the first SPIDER-MAN movie, which led the Marvel Comics superhero renaissance, and Christian movies like PASSION OF THE CHRIST and THE BLIND SIDE.

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