The Uprising Review: Greengrass's Medieval Epic

England, 1381. The Hundred Years' War has drained the treasury, and the Black Death has gutted the labor force, yet the crown keeps squeezing the peasants who survived it. Into this powder keg steps an unnamed ploughman (Andrew Garfield), a widower whose quiet grief curdles into righteous fury after his village is crushed by yet another punishing tax levy. He falls in with John Ball (Jamie Bell), a firebrand priest preaching that all men were made equal, and Wat Tyler (Cosmo Jarvis), a charismatic rebel captain with a taste for violence and an instinct for spectacle. Together they march on London with tens of thousands of commoners at their backs, demanding an end to serfdom and the head of the Archbishop of Canterbury. What follows is a brief, heady taste of power - and then the brutal, bloody reckoning that history remembers.

What Greengrass gets gloriously right is the texture. Working with cinematographer Barry Ackroyd (a longtime collaborator), he shoots the 14th century like a war zone: handheld cameras pressed into crowds, faces streaked with soot and rain, the squelch of boots in mud rendered almost tactile. This is not a film of throne rooms and velvet doublets, though Stephen Dillane's icy turn as Simon Sudbury and Tom Hollander's sneering Sir Robert Hales give the nobility a properly reptilian menace. Greengrass keeps the focus squarely on the peasants - their hunger, their fury, their astonishing, doomed solidarity.

The screenplay, by contrast, is shakier. It compresses sprawling historical events into a conventional three-act hero's journey, and it stumbles when it tries to be clever about it. The dialogue is often blunt to the point of clumsiness, more TED Talk than tavern speech. And at 128 minutes, the film rushes its final act, where the rebellion's collapse - the betrayal at Smithfield, the slaughter of its leaders - gets truncated in a way that blunts the tragedy.

But then there's Garfield. It's the performance that holds the whole thing together - a man who barely speaks in the first act and then burns through the screen in the third. His ploughman is exhausted, decent, radicalized by inches, and Garfield plays every inch of that transformation without a whiff of actorly vanity. Bell, meanwhile, is all twitchy charisma as Ball, spitting righteous rhetoric with a gleam in his eye, and Cosmo Jarvis's Tyler has a movie-star swagger that makes his inevitable fate sting. Thomasin McKenzie does quiet, affecting work as Alyce, the ploughman's fellow traveler and moral compass, though the script doesn't give her enough to do.

Where the film soars is in its crowd scenes. Greengrass stages the march on London with a visceral power that recalls the best of United 93 - thousands of ordinary people moving with one purpose, the camera weaving through them, the sound design layering chanting, footsteps, and the distant clang of alarm bells. Those sequences have a pulse.

Where it falters is in its insistence on telling us what it means. Somewhere around the 90-minute mark, The Uprising starts underlining its themes - freedom, equality, the cost of resistance - as if it doesn't trust the images it has just spent two hours crafting. History is rarely this tidy, and the film's tidy moments are its weakest.

It is, nevertheless, a movie worth seeing for its conviction, and for the way it treats medieval peasants not as set dressing but as people with agency and anger. Hollywood doesn't make many of these anymore - big-canvas historical dramas with sharp edges and no superheroes. That The Uprising exists at all is something to celebrate.

Pros

• Andrew Garfield delivers a career-best performance, all restraint and slow-burning rage.
• Greengrass's handheld, immersive style makes 14th-century England feel immediate and alive.
• The crowd and battle sequences are staged with breathtaking energy and scale.
• Jamie Bell's John Ball crackles with charisma; the supporting cast is uniformly strong.

Cons

• The screenplay is heavy-handed, often spelling out themes the visuals already convey.
• The final act feels rushed, especially the collapse of the rebellion.
• Thomasin McKenzie's Alyce is underwritten and underused.
• At 128 minutes, the middle section drags before the third-act sprint.