What if you took a folk figure or a popular comic-book character'someone beloved enough to be the star of, say, a Disney cartoon'and made a film that cast them in a dark, even antiheroic light' Call it the 'grim and gritty' take, or perhaps the 'untold true story'; it's the kind of reimagining that has befallen several storybook figures on-screen, such as Peter Pan and Hansel and Gretel. The saga of Robin Hood, the British outlaw, is particularly popular, and has been told many times over at this point. He has been a swashbuckling do-gooder from Hollywood's Golden Age, as well as a cute animated fox. But of late, cinema has tried to cast a shadow over the man, not one of those depictions murkier than the director Michael Sarnoski's The Death of Robin Hood. This new rendition stars Hugh Jackman, who is no stranger to roughening up an established protagonist. He most famously played the X-Men character Wolverine as a fading but bloodthirsty old cowboy in Logan, the acclaimed...
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