The end of Michael Sarnoski’s third full-length feature is in its title: The Death of Robin Hood. We wait it out. We know the iconic intellectual property—the man called Robin Hood—will die, and then he does. Then the film is over; its inevitable and straightforward.
Fortunately, Sarnoski is comfortable with inevitability—something we might recall from his first full length, Pig (2021). In it, Nicolas Cage traverses Portland, dreaming of doomsday. He contemplates the Cascadia subduction zone, a real tectonic boundary that could cause a massive earthquake. He occasionally monologues about Portland being wiped out, swallowed by the imagined tsunami that earthquake could cause.
In Pig, Cage plays grizzled shell-of-a-man Rob Feld, a misanthropic former chef who’s absconded to Mt. Hood National Forest to escape Portland’s elite food scene, taking only his truffle-hunting pig and a bellyful of resentment. When his pig is kidnapped, Rob is drawn back to the city and necessarily reacquaints himself with old colleagues by reminding them that soon this city will drown…