“The Uprising” Is a Grim But Scattershot History Lesson

The rebels have their own self-appointed religious authority, though, in the figure of John Ball (a fierce Jamie Bell), Tyler’s radicalized second-in-command. Ball is a priest who has been branded a heretic, and he clings to a grimly Old Testament belief that justice must be exacted in carnage. In time, the King hears the peasants out and agrees to their demands, including the painstaking drafting of charters, one for each county, that will inscribe the end of serfdom into law. (One of the film’s more memorable characters is a lowly scribe—played by Sky Yang—whose conduct proves as admirable as his calligraphy.) But the promise of a more prosperous future is not enough for Ball, who demands that the King’s councillors—they include Sir Robert Hales (Tom Hollander), the treasurer, and Simon Sudbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury (Stephen Dillane)—be put to death as traitors. His desire for retribution is shared by a rebel named Alyce (Thomasin McKenzie), who serves to remind Ploughman that, however universal their rage, everyone has their own intensely personal reasons for joining the fight.

Ball will have his vengeance, for better and for worse. Axes fall and heads roll, but, despite the mob’s ecstatic, bloodthirsty cries, the underlying mood is far from triumphant. Greengrass does not press his moral argument as pointedly as Christopher Nolan did in “The Odyssey,” which, in restaging the fall of Troy, also wrung its hands over a long and dreadfully hypnotic spectacle of mass slaughter. But the intended takeaway here is no less forceful or stern. The film doesn’t mourn the deaths of Richard II’s councillors, much less dispute that they have earned their gory ends. But it suggests that the rebels, in giving themselves over to bloodlust, have set themselves up for a fate of similar brutality.

You might say that “The Uprising” amounts to something of a homecoming for Greengrass; not since his least typical movie, the romantic comedy “The Theory of Flight” (1998), has he set a movie on English soil. Beyond the restless, globe-trotting antics of Jason Bourne, he has tended to turn his camera on ordinary, real-life American heroes: the brave passengers who brought down a hijacked plane, in “United 93” (2006); a veteran seaman whose ship is beset by Somali pirates, in “Captain Phillips” (2013); and, most recently, a down-on-his-luck driver trying to save twenty-two children from a disastrous wildfire, in “The Lost Bus” (2025). “The Uprising,” in the oppressively grim, red-spattered grayness of its visual palette and the clarity with which it toggles between the rebels and their oppressors, sometimes reminded me of “Bloody Sunday” (2002), Greengrass’s powerful re-creation of a deadly 1972 clash between British forces and Northern Irish civil-rights protesters.

Yet it’s not an entirely flattering comparison. In his best films, including “Bloody Sunday,” the director’s convulsive visual technique arises naturally, and forcefully, from the material; his raggedy methods achieve a kind of conceptual seamlessness, and history really does feel as if it’s being forged on the fly. In “The Uprising,” those telltale tricks feel more incongruous, more scattershot and superficially applied, as if Greengrass were trying to juice an otherwise straightforward period piece with an extra layer of realist-action immediacy. The camera never seems to discover anything spontaneously: every movement and formation, and every revealing glance and expression—particularly those of Richard’s mother (Katherine Waterston), forever on the lookout for her son’s welfare—appears to have been painstakingly composed in advance. The camera’s gaze itself veers inconsistently between on-the-ground urgency and drone-shot stateliness; at times, the placid images of the streets and buildings of London, buckling under the force of the peasants’ onslaught, yank us out of the movie’s meticulously constructed maelstrom.

None of which is to deny that “The Uprising,” though seldom in mastery of its material, nonetheless holds us, however intermittently, in its sweaty grip. It derives its resonance, unsurprisingly, from events unfolding beyond the frame. It hardly seems lost on the filmmakers that this quintessentially English spectacle might have particular resonance for an American audience—an audience that, if recent democratic-socialist winds are to be trusted, is impatient for sweeping political and economic change. (Garfield, at pains to emphasize the movie’s relevance and rage, said in a recent interview that he hoped any billionaires who saw it would be “scared shitless.”)