A One Mann’s Movies review of “The Uprising”. (2026, 3.5*, 15).
Medieval muck raking and lack of hygiene. I’ve personally never really warmed to this genre of film. Films like The Last Duel and The Green Knight more stand out as exceptions, just due to their brilliance. And I even avoided the recent The Death of Robin Hood, partly due to the setting and partly because of early feedback from my Flickering Dreams colleagues! (I’ll try to catch it on streaming.) So, even with Paul Greengrass (Jason Bourne, United 93) at the helm, I went into The Uprising with my guard up. But, in the end, I had a good time and enjoyed this fictionalised account of The Peasant’s Revolt.
One Mann’s Movies Rating:
Plot:
It’s England 1381. A Ploughman (Andrew Garfield), bereaved by the plague and at his wits end, cracks at the latest round of tax collection and kills a tax collector. He sparks The Peasant’s Revolt that unifies a disgruntled people and takes them to the very door of the King to demand justice.
Certification:
UK: 15; US: R. (From the BBFC website: “Strong violence, injury detail, sexual assault.” For those really worried about the sexual assault angle, this happens right at the start of the film as the king’s tax collectors forcibly reach up the skirts of young teenage girls to fondle their genitals to check for signs of puberty: a historically correct, if vile, practice since anyone over 15 was due to pay taxes and families often lied about their age.)
Talent:
Starring: Andrew Garfield, Jamie Bell, Stephen Dillane, Woody Norman, Katherine Waterston, Mark Redhead, Tom Hollander, Stanley Townsend, Cosmo Jarvis, Thomasin McKenzie, Jonny Lee Miller.
Directed by: Paul Greengrass.
Written by: Paul Greengrass.
Running Time: 2h 8m.
Review:
Positives:
- The film starts with a nice sense of grief. We see Garfield ploughing his land with an ox (which looks suitably exhausting) – all except for a little patch with three crosses in it, which is understandably best not to plough up. It’s all muck and misery.
- From my limited knowledge of the late 14th century, the film gets a lot of things right. The peasants revolt was led by the fervently religious John Ball and ex-soldier Wat Tyler; the king – Richard II – was a 14 year-old boy on the throne; the peasants (according to such texts of the time such as the Anonimalle Chronicle) were not anti-Royalty, but anti the corrupt officials that had the ear of the king (“All will be well once the poison of wealth is destroyed” preaches John Ball); and there was a battle on the site that is now Smithfield Market: so much in “Central London” now that it is almost impossible to believe that 650 years ago it was countryside outside of the London city walls. (And St. John’s Priory, featured in the film, is also still there, just half a mile from Smithfield Market.)
- Where the film diverges is in the creation of Andrew Garfield’s character – “Ploughman from East Fen” (he never gets a name) – as a proxy for us, the audience, in the film, and of Alyce (Thomasin McKenzie) as a composite of the many brave women that took part in the Peasant’s Revolt but who have probably been expunged from the misogynist historical record. But both of these are good characters and the film was better for their inclusion.
- I loved how the value of the written word was all important to the populace. Having title to their land was the ultimate goal, and the king’s command to produce them (oh, for the invention of the photocopier!) saw the scribes slaving all through the night to produce them. Loved those scenes.
- The action is brutal and visceral, You can only hope that Tom Hollander, Stephen Dillane, Stanley Townsend and (the aptly named) Mark Redhead at least got to take a souvenir home from the shoot!
- The film has a genuinely nightmarish ending that was fun.
Negatives:
- The peasants are stuck outside of the ‘impregnable’ Tower of London. But then, they are inside being beastly to the poor Counsellors. I was unclear how or why: did the King’s Standard give them free passage? It was very unclear to me.
- Some of the model/CGI effects were a bit dodgy. One in particular of London Bridge could have usefully been left out.
- Thomasin McKenzie. I mean, I love her as an actress and she adds value to everything she’s in, but I’m not quite sure about her accent which seemed to stray from ‘Essex Girl’ into something else entirely. She gives Russell Crowe a running in the dodgy medieval accents game.
- The King’s troopers seem to be about as effective as Stormtroopers in their encounters with the peasants, armed with sharpened parsnips, straight from the field.
- The US film distribution company Focus Features briefly rebranded the film The Uprising: The Rise of Robin Hood causing controversy. You can see how they might have been tempted to do that, given the final scenes of the film. I think a colour other than ‘green’ might have helped that!
Summary Thoughts:
A fun historical romp, not short on gruesome death and dismemberment. Garfield again shows his range (in a year that he’s given us the dad from The Magic Faraway Tree and the gay Sam Altman in Artificial). A film that was far more entertaining than I ever expected it to be.
Where to watch?
Trailer:
The trailer for the film is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVkrhHebz1Q.
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