The Uprising Is the Fury Road of Eat-the-Rich Epics

They do everything but literally eat the rich in The Uprising, though it’s possible that amid all the handheld chaos, I missed an insert of someone chewing on a courtier’s shoulder blades or something. Paul Greengrass’s rabble-rousing epic about the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt in England barely even tries to be a historical drama: There’s very little stage-setting, and it doesn’t bother to ease us into its period. It transports us, yes — but it transports us right into the muck and the mud and the fire and the blood. Andrew Garfield’s character doesn’t even have a name. He’s just known as Ploughman. Ploughman mad. Ploughman kill. Ploughman kill with friends. Ploughman sad. Friends dead. Ploughman kill some more. That’s the movie. Dumb, relentless, visceral, cathartic.

Greengrass isn’t after nuance here, especially when it comes to the history-lesson part, which he dispenses with in broad, bloody strokes. The immature boy-king Richard II (Woody Norman) is racked with nightmares and unable to govern. His council of advisers needs to raise money because of the wars they’ve been fighting in Scotland and France. They can’t tax the London merchants, who “will want a seat at the table.” They can’t tax the church because, well, you know. And so: “We have no choice. We must tax the common people!” Cut to some snide tax collector sitting at a table in a village square, terrorizing the peasantry to give up their goods, his men tormenting women and children — a humiliation that includes checking the young women’s genitalia to see if they should count as children or adults. The grieving Ploughman, who lost his wife and kids during the Plague, rushes in to help, and we’re off. Braveheart comparisons are inevitable, but I also thought of Mad Max: Fury Road. Once the revolt starts, there’s seemingly no stopping it.

The Ploughman joins forces with the outlaw priest John Ball (a deliciously fire-breathing Jamie Bell), who tells him to surrender to his rage, that it will set him free. That’s Sith talk, but the film takes it to heart. As the furor grows and cities fall and the mob marches on London, Greengrass lets us bask in the fiery, bloody spectacle of the rich and powerful getting dragged out, beheaded, and otherwise torn to pieces. Yet for all that, the peasants still believe in their king, in the idea of a monarch who’s been anointed by God to rule (justly) over them. They’re convinced that they can petition Richard to give them their freedom. But Richard, for all his innocence and torment — and despite the efforts of his morally upstanding mother (Katherine Waterston) to make him see the righteousness of the revolt — soon proves himself to be unworthy of the crown. 

Greengrass was a documentarian and a master of immersive historical dramas well before he entered Hollywood’s A-list with The Bourne Supremacy (2005) and The Bourne Ultimatum (2007). He’s an interesting figure. (You can read a long interview I did with him a few years ago here.) Over the years, he’s fused his ability to orchestrate vérité-style action and suspense with a dedication to topical urgency, in films like United 93 (2006), Green Zone (2010), and Captain Phillips (2013). Along the way, he also made the stately and moving western, News of the World (2020), a masterful film about post–Civil War societal healing that got lost in the COVID shuffle. Regardless of the project, there’s always a political undercurrent. The Bourne films questioned America’s surveillance and security apparatus in the wake of 9/11. News of the World was clearly a veiled portrait of an America divided during the Trump era. Watching his underrated wildfire thriller The Lost Bus (which came out last year and promptly vanished, buried in streaming purgatory), one can’t help but think of climate collapse. Sometimes the undercurrent is an overcurrent: His 2018 Netflix film 22 July is literally about the neo-Nazi Anders Breivik’s massacre of 77 people in Norway in 2011.

Greengrass is so good at immersing us in these stories’ respective realities that whenever he falters, it stands out. The Uprising is so compellingly bleak and ground-level that occasional computer-generated wide shots of the mayhem feel like another, lesser filmmaker briefly got ahold of the controls. And in his welcome efforts to reach everybody, Greengrass can also run the risk of oversimplifying. The Uprising’s final act does get unwieldy, as the director tries to show just how the rebellion was betrayed. The betrayal itself is largely accurate, but it’s staged in a rushed, unconvincing manner, as if the film’s bold narrative strokes earlier had painted the script into a corner. There’s also an action-movie-style postscript that’s probably what caused Focus Features, the film’s U.S. distributor, to briefly label The Uprising a Robin Hood origin story. It’s not … but in truth, it could be, which comes off as a little silly. Still, when it’s rolling, The Uprising gets your blood boiling nice and hot.

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