Movie Review: Medieval action drama 'The Uprising' struggles under a Robin Hood origin twist

“The Uprising” starts as a true story of medieval England in the grip of economic revolution. That's good stuff. Then it gets inexplicably hijacked by an origin story for one of the West's most popular folk heroes. That's head-scratching stuff.

Paul Greengrass' movie mixes fact and fiction in such an anachronistic, uncomfortable way that it undercuts the movie-maker's initial populist scream and ceases to hold its historical power, like air escaping a deflated balloon.

It begins with a simple farmer — played with unflinching commitment by Andrew Garfield — plowing his marshy plot in east England in 1381. It builds to the blood-soaked streets of London, where this simple farmer's demands helped put the mighty British crown in real jeopardy during the Peasants’ Revolt. Then it turns out the farmer is Robin Hood. What? “The Uprising” might be 2026’s worst case of cinematic overreach.

Greengrass has said he was inspired to write and direct “The Uprising” following the pandemic, recalling how the Black Death plague of the late 1300s had killed so many and led to spasms of violence against those in power. But he’s ended up meshing fact — real rebel leaders Wat Tyler and John Ball — and fiction, that Hood dude. And no one is merry, if you know what I mean.

The arc of Garfield's character — only known as “Ploughman,” a nod to William Langland’s poem “Piers Plowman” — is fascinating, going from a humble widower-farmer to leading ragtag armies of urchins against the mighty crown like an English version of “Les Miserables.” He's a little too perfect — a noble, grieving philosopher-warrior-diplomat-everyman.

Ploughman is motivated by unrelenting taxes and cruelty by the king’s men — “We’ve given you enough!” he screams — to demand change only to get swept up in the eat-the-rich movement and watch in disgust as his demands for economic rights and dignity dissolve into widespread looting and anarchy. “I did not come for this,” he says. “Where is God in any of this?” But to be fair, he does also kill a sergeant-at-arms to kick the whole thing off. It’s a pity he’s entirely fictional.

Jamie Bell, who plays the priest Ball, and Cosmo Jarvis' Tyler, are outstanding as leaders of the people, with slightly different agendas. Woody Norman is brilliant as the teenage Richard II, simpering one moment and lethal the next, and Katherine Waterston is awesome as the king's mother. The rebels naively believe all they need is to get the king to hear their demands. They're in for a shock. “Justice has a price, does it not?” a simpering royal counselor says.

Greengrass' movie is gloriously rooted in the medieval muck. Animals bleat, smoke billows, hair is stringy, cloaks are filthy, no one has washed. You can almost smell the body odor through the screen. The violence is also not stylized — it's brutal, from beheadings and arrows slicing into bodies to our Ploughman suspiciously good at close-contact swordplay.

For three-quarters of the movie, we’re on Greengrass’ side, helped by his penchant for shaky, handheld camerawork, which here matches the kinetic, always-on-the-move drama.

Movie audiences are facing an affordability crisis and here is a populist rebellion against an out-of-touch aristocracy. “Can you not hear their rage?” the king asks. But violence is violence and some viewers will wince when a mob bursts into royal offices to burn and pillage, recalling scenes from the 2021 Capitol riot.

That good will Greengrass has built — he even supplied lyrics to marching songs — evaporates when Ploughman becomes Robin Hood. It doesn't even make temporal sense: Those stories were set during the reign of Richard the Lionheart, who died nearly two centuries before the Peasants’ Revolt took place. Putting him in “The Uprising” is like putting Paul Bunyan at the Chernobyl disaster. You can do it, but why?

Also, it doesn't make much character sense. Ploughman goes from embracing populism to the depths of cynicism only to re-emerge as an outlaw in the woods robbing rich folks? And a morose Robin Hood is not what we want in 2026, especially a second one following Hugh Jackman’s “The Death of Robin Hood.” Greengrass has quite simply robbed his own movie. We did not come for this.

“The Uprising,” a Focus Features release that's in theaters Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “violence/bloody images.” Running time: 127 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.