Paul Greengrass has already made his "uprising" film: United 93, the 2006 masterpiece about passengers on United Airlines flight 93 who fought the 9/11 hijackers. His new movie, shot in his signature handheld docu-reportage style, is nominally about the 1381 Peasants' Revolt, where Wat Tyler and John Ball led an insurrection against Richard II's poll tax. But in a disconcertingly silly way, the film imagines the uprising as an origin myth for Robin Hood — or at least someone who's supposed to be more or less Robin Hood, since that's not what he's called and the dates don't quite match up.
Three heroes of the revolt
Ex-soldier Tyler and radical preacher Ball, played by Cosmo Jarvis and Jamie Bell, are joined by a third fictional hero, apparently destined later to ride through the forest with a wealth-redistribution plan. He is a ploughman, known simply as "Ploughman", played by Andrew Garfield. Grieving the loss of his wife and children to the plague and sickened by the tax collectors' greed and brutality, he instigates an insurrection that merges into other outbreaks of revolutionary rage.
This involves rivers of smudgy-faced folk in rough clothes descending on the capital from all directions, demanding concessions from the king, to whom they remain loyal and believe has been misled by advisers.
Royal performances and a coda
The well-bathed royal overlords may remind you of the Monty Python and the Holy Grail line about how to tell if someone is a king. Tom Hollander gives an enjoyable performance as the king's evil adviser Sir Robert Hales, Katherine Waterston is stylish and composed as Joan of Kent, the king's mother, and Woody Norman has a sinister moon-faced blankness as the young Richard II. There are moments to enjoy in the overclass performances, and to respect in those of the doomed uprisers, whose heroism is supposed to create a historic legacy of fighting against bullies and tyrants.
The coda sees Garfield emerging from the dense forest with his un-merry men like a gag-free episode of Blackadder, being oddly lenient with the ermine-clad VIPs they catch. It's a bit of a letdown. The Uprising is in UK and Irish cinemas from 9 October.
