Paul Greengrass already made his definitive uprising film. United 93 (2006) is a masterwork of collective heroism — real people, real stakes, a ticking clock the audience already knows how to read. The Uprising is built on similar formal instincts: handheld cameras, documentary grain, bodies in mud. But where United 93 had the discipline of known history to hold it together, The Uprising keeps inventing. The 1381 Peasants' Revolt is rich enough material without embellishment. Wat Tyler and John Ball — Cosmo Jarvis and Jamie Bell playing them capably — led an extraordinary insurrection against Richard II's poll tax, marched on London, and came terrifyingly close to dismantling the feudal order. That story has genuine tragedy built in: Tyler was killed under a flag of truce, Ball was hanged. Greengrass has the bones of a devastating film. He chooses, disconcertingly, not to make it. Instead he introduces a third protagonist — a nameless Ploughman, played by Andrew Garfield, grieving a wife and children taken by plague, radicalised by tax-collector brutality — who is quite plainly Robin Hood in all but name, present for legal or mythological hedging reasons that the film never makes coherent. The dates don't match. The character isn't called Robin. But he'll eventually emerge from the forest, and you're expected to nod along. It's a concept that would need to be handled with considerable wit to work; Greengrass handles it with a straight face, which is the one face it can't afford. The overclass performances are the film's genuine pleasure. Tom Hollander's Sir Robert Hales is enjoyably malevolent, Katherine Waterston brings real composure to Joan of Kent, and Woody Norman gives young Richard II a sinister moon-faced blankness that's more unsettling than outright villainy. The moments when the film trusts its historical material — the rivers of rough-clothed rebels converging on London, the king's panicked concessions — have real propulsive power. Greengrass's camera still knows how to make collective action feel urgent and bodily. The coda is where the accumulated hedging collapses into disappointment. The obvious move — cutting to the 1990 poll tax riots, connecting the 600-year arc of resistance — would have been the kind of bold anachronism that redeems a film's formal gambles. Greengrass doesn't take it. Instead Garfield steps out of the forest with his un-merry men in a scene the review rightly compares to a gag-free Blackadder, and the ermine-clad prisoners are treated with puzzling leniency. The film that wanted to be about revolutionary rage ends by declining to fully commit to it. What's left is a film with strong individual components and a structurally confused centre. The Greengrass toolkit — immersive chaos, physical immediacy, ensemble grief — is intact. The problem is the myth-laundering: by insisting the Peasants' Revolt was secretly a Robin Hood origin story, the film turns historical tragedy into franchise preamble. The real Wat Tyler deserved better. So did Andrew Garfield, who has enough screen presence to carry a film that knew what it wanted to say.
