Review: ‘The Uprising’ is a shaky-cam slog with a muddy message

In The Uprising, director Paul Greengrass, known for the Jason Bourne sequels, tackles the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt, sparked by greedy aristocrats raising taxes to cover Black Plague-induced labor shortages. If that sounds like an apt way to explore our current economic turmoil in the years following the pandemic, it very well could have been. But without interest in its characters and with too-timid political messaging, The Uprising feels anything but revolutionary. 

Andrew Garfield stars as Ploughman (named so because that’s what he does), a farmer who has already had enough when we meet him. The overworked land won’t produce, he’s lost his entire family to the plague, and now the corrupt councilors of the meek teenage King Richard II want to take from the little that he and his fellow villagers have left. So in the first few minutes of The Uprising, he snaps and attacks the tax collector and murders a soldier. 

This action sparks revolts around the country, and the fictional Ploughman goes off to join the historical leaders of the revolt, former soldier Wat Tyler (Cosmo Jarvis, Shogun) and John Ball (Jamie Bell, Half Man), a heretic priest thrown out of the Church of England for his utopian teachings that all men and women are created equal. Together, they march to London, hoping to petition and free Richard II (Woody Norman, C’mon C’mon, one of the few bright spots here) from his advisors, who are basically Game of Thrones rejects without any nuance. 

That’s the movie’s main problem. Greengrass’s script shows little interest in developing or exploring genuinely fascinating historical figures, connecting them to current events, or really anything besides having people covered in mud march around and somehow manage to yell and mumble at the same time, delivering largely indecipherable exposition. And because Greengrass has positioned the fictitious character Ploughman as the lead, instead of having Garfield play a real person like Wat Tyler, Garfield does a lot of standing around and looking lost. This continues until a very silly extended coda that tries to turn The Uprising into a Robin Hood origin story, as if it were going to spawn a franchise.  

Much of this would be forgivable if Greengrass had staged some epic action sequences or fully committed to the brutality that The Uprising only hints at, but all of this is obscured and hindered by the decision to bring back the flat, digital, shaky-cam visual style that The Bourne Identity pioneered and was everywhere in the 2000s. (Greengrass came in only for the Bourne sequels and adopted the docurealist style as his own.) 

While I initially felt a little nostalgic seeing all the shaky cam, glitchy cuts, and random zooms, it didn’t add the same grittiness it did to the hectic, anxiety-inducing fight scenes in the Bourne movies or the post-9/11 paranoia and surveillance. Instead, every time it cuts to someone’s blank, expressionless reaction, it lands unintentionally like the satire of an episode of Succession or Veep. It’s also quite exhausting over time, and coupled with a thin plot stretched out to over two hours, The Uprising feels endless. I’ve never checked my watch so many times while watching a movie, and I was genuinely shocked the first time I did and realized only 30 minutes had passed. 

By not caring about its characters and robbing us of any historical epic thrills, we’re left with a trite political message: the elites are bad, and we shouldn’t trust them. While true, The Uprising lacks specificity and is so broad that any ideology could attach itself to the movie for its own interests. You could read The Uprising, if you wanted to, as a message of leftist insurgency, January 6th rioters let down by an uncaring ruler, COVID restriction protestors, etc. Call me a cynic, but the broadness feels like an intentional way to capitalize on global unrest in order to sell more movie tickets.