The Uprising, directed by Paul Greengrass, follows a group of rebels through England’s Peasants’ Revolt againt King Richard II. It’s a fairly decently-crafted historical drama that is sadly undercut by a marketing campaign that couldn’t seem to make up its mind.
Producer Blumhouse and US distributor Focus Features spent months positioning the film as a grounded period piece, only to pivot late with the tagline “The Rise of Robin Hood,” hinting that Garfield’s character might secretly be the legendary outlaw. The UK distributor, Entertainment Film Distributors, wanted no part of it, telling Metro that the film “is a historical epic about the Peasants’ Revolt, not Robin Hood,” and that its own marketing campaign “does not make any reference to Robin Hood.” It’s a strange bit of noise around the release, but it I guess any publicity is good publicity these days.
Set in 1381, in the aftermath of the Black Death, The Uprising follows Andrew Garfield’s Ploughman, a grieving farmer ordered to pay taxes on his dead wife and children, whose breaking point sparks a mass revolt. Joined by Wat Tyler (Cosmo Jarvis) and preacher John Ball (Jamie Bell), the rebels march on London, initially hopeful that the boy-king Richard II might side with them. That hope proves badly misplaced.
The film is at its best when it explores the anger driving the rebellion rather than just staging its violence, though there’s plenty of that too — brutal, unflinching, and central to its argument that freedom is never simply handed down by those in power. Liberty offered by people who stand to lose from it, the film suggests, is rarely genuine, and promises of reform can be just another means of control. It’s a bleak, cynical thesis, and an effective one.
The cast sells it completely. Garfield grounds the Ploughman’s fury in grief rather than generic heroism, Jarvis gives Tyler real force, and Bell brings both conviction and vulnerability to Ball. Once London falls and the rebels turn on merchants and the wealthy, the line between justice and revenge blurs; and the film is smart enough not to let its heroes off the hook for what the revolution becomes in their hands.
Unfortunately, it throws much of this away in the final stretch. A year after the revolt, the Ploughman turns up in a Forest in a green hood, confronting the king as a proto-Robin Hood figure. It’s a baffling swerve by Greengrass, grafting familiar mythology onto a story that had already built its own identity, and one that cheapens everything preceding it. The Peasants’ Revolt didn’t need a superhero-origin story, there are plenty of books written about that particular bloody episode.
For most of its runtime, The Uprising is angry, thoughtful, and genuinely gripping. It just loses its nerve right when it should be trusting the story it already told.
