Whatever confusion The Uprising’s chaotic marketing campaign might have caused, it does get one thing kind of right about the medieval revenge thriller. It’s not really a Robin Hood story until it suddenly is, thanks to an awkward coda tacked onto the end of its arduous retelling of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. It’s something like a studio note swathed in a vaguely green burlap cloak, and it’s ironically the biggest bummer within a tale that’s bleak enough as it is.
Writer-director Paul Greengrass is no stranger to gritty adaptations of harrowing true-life events: apart from his contributions to the Jason Bourne saga, it’s probably what he does best. His jolty handheld camerawork will never not court controversy, but for those pure of heart, it actually does add something to The Uprising that other, stuffier medieval epics (Robin Hood stories or no) often lack. There’s something gratifying, if bemusing, in the way his fly-on-the-wall cinematography clashes with the austere stylings here.
Greengrass wants us to feel like we’re in lockstep with Andrew Garfield’s Ploughman — no, he does not have a real name: “I am what I do,” he declares early in the film — as he toils over the barren fields he’s bound to as a 14th-century serf. We’re also meant to feel like we’re intruding on a private moment when he visits the graves of his family, who, along with half of England, perished in the Plague seven years before. That unbroken intimacy only intensifies with the introduction of the nation’s Boy King, Richard II (Woody Norman). Tormented with visions of civil and spiritual unrest, he’s first seen waking from a nightmare, sweaty and screaming. Greengrass’ camera is surely tucked into a dark corner somewhere, lurking like the demons that lurk in his dreams.
The Uprising positions the King and the Ploughman as two halves of a haunted whole. To each man, the rising unrest in Britain is the manifestation of years of untenable rot — and the disparate hands they play in guiding and/or quelling the titular revolt bring some much-needed novelty to the classic Dadcore epic. The Uprising is grim and grey in ways that modern audiences have long tired of seeing, but beneath all that squelchy mud beats a thoughtful heart, one that this brand of medieval movie has been lacking for some time. If only it wasn’t so set on becoming something it’s not.
It’s easy to see why The Uprising can’t resist planting a seed of a superhero origin here. Garfield’s Ploughman was not the leader of the real Peasants’ Revolt — that honor goes to Shōgun’s Cosmo Jarvis, in reliably great form here — but that makes him the perfect everyman to guide a modern audience into an unfamiliar world. Granted, it’s not that unfamiliar: take away The Uprising’s austere, soggy farmlands and towering castles and you’re left with a world-breaking pandemic, oppressive oligarchs, and a dogged desire to rewrite the status quo — most of which we’re all intimately familiar with. But Garfield still brings far more soul than expected, all with so much bubbling beneath the surface.
We’re with Ploughman as he throws the first blow in what eventually becomes the Peasants’ Revolt. The genie is out of the bottle from the moment he picks a fight with a gang of unfeeling tax collectors, organized and efficient as this proto-revolution might be. When word of Ploughman’s bravery reaches the heretic priest John Ball (Jamie Bell) and the stoic soldier Wat Tyler (Jarvis), a few dozen men become a hundred, then a thousand, and then countless more. Their joint pursuit is a noble one: travel to London in time for the Feast of Corpus Christi, and there, petition the king for fairer wages. Our heroes are also (rightly) convinced that Richard is essentially a hostage to his advisors, so they’ll have to go, too. It’s not long before cries for justice turn into calls for revenge, for blood, and for heads to inevitably roll.
Unwieldy as this story gets, The Uprising’s stellar cast makes it all worth watching.
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The Uprising doesn’t skimp on scale: when the revolt swells to ten thousand strong, you absolutely feel the might of their numbers. Greengrass has no choice but to launch off the ground and into sweeping, bird’s-eye shots of the insurrection as it converges on London — but these are the moments that feel the most divorced from his vision, divisive as it may be. More effective are the moments where Greengrass plants us in the middle of this raging throng, carving out intimate conversations between Ploughman and his new allies as they try (and largely fail) to keep their followers in check. These characters mostly read like D&D companions without any compelling backstory. Like our reluctant lead, they are what they do, but Bell, Jarvis, and a fiercely fanatic Thomasin Mackenzie are more than enough to make you root for, even love, this not-so-merry band of misfits.
On the other side of that coin is Norman’s Richard II. Though he’s surrounded by a who’s who of capital-T Thespians — Tom Hollander, for one, and Jonny Lee Miller as a last-minute addition you’ll love to hate — our young regent more than holds his own. Richard grows from a sniveling teen with decision paralysis to the Boy King his mother, the all-seeing Countess (Katherine Waterston), quietly wishes he could be. Of course, wearing the Crown inevitably brings on an inflated ego, and Norman sells every beat of his unorthodox villain arc with assured specificity.
Woody Norman more than holds his own as a floundering King Richard.
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As an exploration of divine right and the twisted dynamic between God and kings and men, The Uprising is downright hypnotizing. Greengrass builds dread palpable enough to induce nausea; the only problem is this story doesn’t know quite where to drop the curtain. The catharsis one might expect from a Gladiator or a Braveheart is harder to find in something this bleak — hence, probably, its afterthought of a blockbuster ending. At just two hours, it all feels much longer than it actually is. No one would accuse Greengrass of pulling punches, but there’s something tepid and tame in the direction he chooses to take the Ploughman here.
It’s rare to catch a film like this these days: a well-made epic that focuses more on narrative weight than its crowd-pleasing moments. The Uprising is so close to sticking that landing, but its attempts to fold this unruly tale neatly into a myth we all know almost render it toothless.
