Anger management: "The Uprising"

This has been the most muted reception afforded a Paul Greengrass film since 2020's News of the World, and that emerged during lockdown as one of those occasional for-streaming projects directors now have to undertake for creative collateral. Part of that response is likely the muddiness - and, as many critical first responders have noted, the sheer muddledness - of The Uprising itself, Greengrass's self-penned account of the 14th century Peasants' Revolt. Part of it may be a residual metropolitan unease around the idea of Englishness being evoked here. We rejoin this filmmaker in social historian mode: it's Greengrass the World in Action graduate trying to tap into that pulsing vein of popular discontent that has bulged out of the world's forehead in recent times. (In interviews, the director has pointed out that the epicentres of this Revolt - notably Kent and Essex - were also the epicentres of Brexit.) This script doesn't have to look far to spot parallels between then and now: the widely perceived shredding of a social contract (here overseen by a child king, as bratty and guileless as many recent British PMs), a restless populace emerging from years of plague with a desire for a world that aligns more closely with their beliefs and ideals, politicos choosing to spare the rich and tax the poor instead, a festering resentment that suddenly gathers momentum and erupts overground with unanticipated consequences. The film's notional subject, then, is rage: that urge we sometimes get, individually and collectively, to rise up, smash things up and - if necessary - string people up. It's Brexit, it's January 6th, it's whatever the fuck is currently going on down on the South Coast. But at a crucial juncture, The Uprising turns against itself; someone other than Greengrass appears to take back control, and the drama is seen to shoot itself in the foot. In the end, it's a film that doesn't so much explain Brexit as exemplify it.

The opening two thirds, guided by a sometime documentarist's eye, aren't bad: this is almost certainly the first multiplex film of this type to have been made by someone who's seen and internalised the work of Peter Watkins and the Brownlow/Mollo Winstanley. (Not unrelated: Greengrass appears to be working on a smaller budget than usual.) We spy traces of Greengrass the skilled tactician at work in the depiction of how networks of resistance are built, a process that in the 14th century was far more haphazard - and far more complicated - than simply clicking on a Facebook group. And familiar faces and names begin to emerge from the prevailing autumnal gloom: Cosmo Jarvis as the farmer-turned-figurehead Wat Tyler, Jamie Bell as the so-called heretic preacher John Ball. Our primary focal point, however, is a young man referred to only as Ploughman. Played by Andrew Garfield, with his soulful, searching gaze and boyband hair, Ploughman enters the gathering throng with the best of intentions and the dictionary definition of legitimate concerns: as we find him, he's just being radicalised by the imposition of the so-called death tax, which obliged family members to pay for the passing of their loved ones, and by the roughing-up of a defenceless woman by the King's goons. Set against the radical Ball and the insurrectionist Tyler, Ploughman can seem a bit Lib Dem, imploring his fellow citizens to send captured noblemen back to their castles and palaces with warning messages, rather than taking an axe to any heads. Yet as the crowd marches on London, Ploughman's function here is mostly that of an observer, spotting the notes of solidarity and fellow-feeling, hearing out shared grievances, registering what happens when the delicate process of dialogue breaks down, bearing witness to the subsequent spiralling of rage, acts of treachery and finally bloodshed. For the most part, The Uprising is the same cautionary tale you were told in secondary school - by teachers themselves trying to ward off potential insurrections - only written slightly larger for the big screen.

As filmed history, it's small-c conservative rather than joltingly radical, but governed by a steadying sobriety and seriousness that steers it some of the way: I wasn't reminded of Python, as some colleagues have been. Cinematographer Pål Ulvik Rokseth shoots in sombre earth tones, capturing individuals getting swallowed up by and lost in frenzied, hollering, pitchfork-wielding mobs, rebels on one side, courtiers (an illustrious cabal: Tom Hollander, Stephen Dillane, Stanley Townsend, Jonny Lee Miller) on the other, a woman and a child (in the form of Woody Norman's Richard II and his etiolated mother Katherine Waterston) somewhere in the middle. Greengrass the reporter beds in among them, keeping an eye out for both the root causes and the murderously illegitimate effects of this revolt. Sure, tear it down, burn it up, leave the EU, if you must; toss your leaders and figureheads out of windows and under a bus. But what are you going to replace those things with? What's your long-term strategy here? Those aren't bad questions for a mass entertainment to be asking in 2026, and they inform the supporting performances to some degree. Jarvis's Tyler is a simple man elevated to prominence after landing a few well-aimed punches; strategically, though, he's soon out of his depth, spending almost the entire second half looking woozy, punch-drunk, historically concussed. (Bell's Ball, meanwhile, resembles Nosferatu in his shaven head and robes.) The Kiwi Thomasin McKenzie, however, feels miscast as a close-cropped Home Counties urchin, seemingly drafted in to make a rugged film less blokey, and this Uprising does finally appear to have been quelled by a slow drip of producers' notes. (Among the less expected names on these credits: Jason Blum, founder of Blumhouse.) For ninety minutes, The Uprising is - contra its title - a mournful, circumspect, quietly admirable pageant, striving to calm us down rather than agitate. Yet towards the end, the tone shifts and the film charges away from its director. Altogether more bullish in its action, the battlefield conclusion is Sealed Knot Ridley Scott, while a frankly silly coda, reframing the Ploughman as a proto-Robin Hood putting the fear of God into the ruling classes, leaves us in the sunlit uplands of historical wish-fulfilment. Greengrass, too, seems to have been worn down into giving the people what they want. It's a pity, but The Uprising has the distinct look of a film on the roots of English resistance cut off at the knees by foreign agitators: in this case, restless test audiences in suburban Californian multiplexes.

The Uprising is now playing in cinemas nationwide.