With the Black Death behind them, but the scars still fresh from the massive losses suffered across the region, the council of fourteen year old King Richard II (Woody Norman) enacts a tax on the peasant farmer class to rebuild the royal coffers. When the tax collector (Sam Chapman) comes to Fobbing, Essex, he and the royal guard are met with resistance by a Ploughman (Andrew Garfield). Word of his actions inspire the heretic Friar John (John Ball) and the son of a slain war veteran, Wat Tyler (Cosmo Jarvis) who lead a march onto London to meet the king, demand their freedom, and the marking of his council as traitors to the people of England.

Paul Greengrass writes and directs The Uprising, a 1381-set historical drama based on the peasants’ revolt and morphed in the final minutes into a Robin Hood origin story; a reveal spilled by Focus Features in the final run up to release, adding the subtitle “The Rise of Robin Hood” to the marketing material. The 127-minute film bypassed any festival screenings, instead opting to storm the nation on more than 2,000 screens, hoping to flood the market on the first post-summer frame. This slightly anachronistic connection in a bid to boost title awareness or box office by associating the myth of Robin Hood could help to nudge an apprehensive audience’s expectations, in practice, it is a strange choice that, while resulting in a exciting finale, takes away from the bulk of the film as we wait for an exciting reveal that has been spoiled for us by the studios in the same way the Warner Brothers spilled the beans on Sinners (2025) being a vampire feature.

The Uprising centers itself around Garfield’s Ploughman in a role that plays to the actor’s strengths as an unwitting hero that is relatable to the masses. He does well, but this is hardly a role that challenges him and it is apparent on the screen. While he is not by any means phoning it in, he is not stretching himself much, but a lot of that is due to the beguiling choices on the page made by Greengrass. This is a film that ascribes so much potential behind the nameless Ploughman, but by tipping their hand and revealing that he will become Robin Hood, Greengrass feels like he does not need to develop his lead on the page. This would be a serviceable choice had Ball’s John, Jarvis’ Wat, or Alyce (Thomasin McKenzie), in the romantic lead, been more fully fleshed out, but even in the ensemble, everything remains very vague and archetypical.

The film instead teases its most interesting aspects in the palace intrigue that is unraveling under young Richard’s nose and in front of his mother, Joan of Kent’s (Katherine Waterson), helpless eyes. After the death of his grandfather, King Edward III, Richard ascended the throne, a title he was due after being named heir apparent in the wake of his father’s, Edward the Black Prince, untimely death due to infection after injuries sustained in the Battle of Nájera. His grandfather’s advisors, however, were salivating at the thought of exploiting the young, nightmare-stricken King to further grow their own power across the city. For much of the film, Greengrass seems more interested in fostering a sense of sympathy for the King, and Norman, to his credit does about as well as he can similarly to how the young Richard II did about as well as he could when handed a mess of a kingdom. While the audience may enjoy the surprise of the final act ambush through the dawning realization from Richard’s Scribe (Sky Yang), it likewise becomes a frustrating realization that we spent so much time wallowing in the mud when the real action was taking place behind the parapets of stone of the Tower of London.

To make up for this, Greengass does ask his cinematographer, Pål Ulvik Rokseth, who, until this point, was capturing the action with a free flowing camera akin to an episode of The Office (2005-2013), to steady his lens and allow the cast a chance to actually perform in their roles. Garfield, with the benefit of the weight of the story on his shoulders, excels in these quieter moments as he also gets to act as a salve to the more belligerent Friar John who can easily turn audiences away from the peasants’ plight. In these slowed down moments, Garfield is able to build from a far a mutual understanding with Waterson’s Joan; who, it must be said, is fiercely radiant in the role. As widow of the heir apparent and mother to the King, her involvement with the court is more of a nuisance to the advisership than anything else, but she refuses to yield in her own convictions and motherly instinct to protect her young son. While the narrative foil is between the King and Ploughman – both leaders of their people – Watterson’s steely resolve opposite Garfield’s own resolute offers some of the most interesting moments when the two classes collide across the film’s runtime.

Much of the film takes place in the muddy fields, though, and while this tendency for spectacle plays well within Greengrass’ style, the actual visuals on screen feel starkly at odds with those smaller, more dramatic scenes. As the world of the film opens up, he employs sweeping, overhead establishing shots that look so frustratingly artificial. The components are so separate from the backgrounds, held together by color grading akin to distressing yellowed, late summer leaves thin enough to see through the battered fibers. This extended beyond just the castles and the villages, but the crowds and even the smaller boats are also affected. Greengrass is molding his film in the shape of the battle field epics of yore where casts of thousands stormed the fields and brought these folk stories to life, but this is a style of filmmaking that is just incompatible in today’s industry. It is rather perverse that these larger than life stories that should be seen on the big screen end up being betrayed by that very format.

The Uprising fits well into Greengrass’ wheelhouse following the thread of an everyman turned hero, and likewise, the role also fits well into Garfield’s wheelhouse, too. The elements are all there and a much better film is present in pieces from what we see on screen which is makes the actual experience such a frustrating watch at times. Greengrass, far from incompetent, is simply stuck in his ways, refusing to bend his stylistic fetishes to better fit the story and the genre at hand. Thankfully, there is an incredible amount of inherent intrigue latent in Greengrass’ script and the ebbs and flows of history that The Uprising rarely loses its audience’s interest, but there are large swatches of the film where Greengrass seemingly looses focus. He is not looking to bend history to shoehorn Robin Hood into the narrative, but he struggles the really tap into a true narrative artery and the meandering to be generous approach – lackadaisical to be a little more critical – really does a disservice to the overall film. Epics, even in their scope, need a precise focus from the filmmaker, and Greengrass, to his credit, is seemingly enamored with too many aspects to pick just one thread to follow here. On one hand, this is an admirable approach to such a unique and interesting story, but he approaches it with sensibilities akin to a mini-series while remaining too tight in the run time to support everything he did work to establish. With truncated pacing and budget VFX, The Uprising, through many – but not all – factors far beyond Greengrass’ control, ultimately fails to inspire audiences, even as we watch an all-too-righteous revolution unfold in front of us.