When you’re a kid there’s nothing greater than discovering woods up against your subdivision. This untamed area was a great place to play after school and during the weekend when your parents didn’t have plans. Things were even better if you had a bunch of kids living in the area that wanted to hangout in the pines and play. Unlike being in a backyard, nobody “owned” the woods so the whiny kid couldn’t get bratty and call their parents to have you removed. Over the decades, woods next to a thriving neighborhood became a rarity as developers wanted to squeeze more dwelling units into every available square foot of land. Such is the basis for Robin and The Hoods, a family film about the magic of the neighborhood woods.
The movie starts with a group of knights on horseback circling a young member of Robin Hood’s Merry Men. When Robin (Darcey Ewart) shows up and nails the head of the knights with an arrow, it becomes all-out war for the knights wanting to conquer the woods. But the imagery occasionally exposes that the knights and merry men aren’t from way back. The knights complain about being stuck at the skatepark while Robin and her crew have built a tree fort in the woods. The facade gets completely shattered when one of the kids gets hit the head during the melee. The ambulance arrives and we see the suburbs just outside the trees. A bigger threat to the woods than the knights arrives when “Clipboard” (Naomie Harris, Skyfall) knocks on Robin’s front door. There’s a neighborhood meeting being set up to unveil the plan to turn the woods into a new development. The parents think having a Kid Zone playground in the shopping center is safer for their children than the wilderness. Will the neighborhood children be able to protect their kingdom from this invading real estate scheme?
I appreciated how at first it felt like we were going to have a retelling of the Adventures of Robin Hood with kids in the adult roles like an adaptation of Bugsy Malone. But then we get a glimpse that this isn’t truly taking place in medieval times when they giveaway the reality of Robin’s arrow when it hits a kid in the forehead. It’s a fun reveal. Director Phil Hawkins and his crew are able to capture childhood imagination with the reality of the action in the woods. We also see that the kids aren’t the only people using the woods. Gwendoline Christie (Game of Thrones and Sandman) plays a woman who has built a camp in the trees. Although Robin imagines her as a character that would be in the kingdom. She is useful in the battle against the developers. They need all the help they can get as someone who has witnessed neighborhood forests vanishing. Robin And The Hoods is masterful movie about how kids want things to feel like in the woods.
ROBIN AND THE HOODS will begin streaming on major digital platforms, including AppleTV, Amazon, Google/YouTube, Fandango at Home, Kaleidescape, InDemand & DirectTV on August 27
Shout! Studios present Robin and The Hoods. Directed by Phil Hawkins. Screenplay by Stuart Benson & Paul Davidson. Starring Naomie Harris, Gwendoline Christie, Darcey Ewart, Gloria Ishikawa, Dexter Sol Ansell, Bruno Edgington-Gibson, Eddison Burch, Mark Williams, Morgana Robinson & Christine Bottomley. Running Time: 100 minutes. Rating: Unrated. Release Date: August 27, 2025.
