Paul Greengrass has in fact already made his “uprising” film: United 93, the gut-wrenching 2006 masterpiece about the passengers onboard United Airlines flight 93 who rose up against the 9/11 hijackers and prevented them from hitting their destination and causing fatalities – except, that is, for those onboard the plane. Greengrass’s new movie, shot in his distinctive handheld, docu-reportage style, is notionally about the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt, in which Wat Tyler and John Ball became legendary for leading an insurrection against the cruel poll tax of Richard II. Or at least … it sort of is. Because the film, in a disconcertingly silly way, imagines the uprising as an origin myth for Robin Hood, or at least someone who’s supposed to be more or less Robin Hood – because that’s not what he’s called and the dates don’t quite match up.
Ex-soldier Tyler and radical preacher Ball, capably played by Cosmo Jarvis and Jamie Bell, are joined by a third fictional hero, apparently destined later to canter 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 soon merges into other outbreaks of revolutionary rage. This involves rivers of smudgy-faced folk in rough clothes descending on the capital from all directions, to demand concessions from the king to whom they are still loyal and believe to have been misled by advisers.
The appearance of the well-bathed royal overlords themselves may remind you of the immortal line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail about how to tell if someone is a king. Tom Hollander gives a very enjoyable performance as his majesty’s evil adviser Sir Robert Hales, and Katherine Waterston is typically stylish and composed as Joan of Kent, the king’s mother, while Woody Norman has a sinister moon-faced blankness as the young Richard II himself. There are moments to enjoy in all the overclass performances, and indeed to respect in those of the doomed uprisers, whose heroism nonetheless is supposed to create a historic legacy of fighting against bullies and tyrants.
That, it seems, is the point of it all. Which brings us to the coda; I wondered if Greengrass would boldly hit us with an immersive scene from London’s 1990 poll tax riots. But no. It’s Garfield emerging from the dense forest with his un-merry men like a gag-free episode of Blackadder, and being oddly lenient with the ermine-clad VIPs that they catch. It’s a bit of letdown.
• The Uprising is in UK and Irish cinemas from 9 October.
