In The Uprising, people rise up in a peasant’s revolt and clash with a teenage English king. This gritty film calls for justice for the downtrodden and freedom from tyranny. But it’s a bloody, dark slog of a movie with a splash of a twisted Robin Hood in its DNA and nearly no redeeming qualities.
King Richard II is young and inexperienced. Since his father’s death, he’s been plagued with nightmares about enraged demons flooding into his castle halls. Besides the fact that he’s barely more than a boy, those horrible dreams have made Richard completely ineffective. All he can do is fall to his knees in the dark of night and pray.
In fact, the young king’s struggles have also driven the queen mother to her knees in prayer, too, begging for something or someone to help her boy fulfill his station.
In the meantime, the British kingdom of 1381 is suffering. The people are just returning to a semblance of normal after a plague killed off half the population. And with fewer people, there are also fewer taxes being paid. So the royal coffers are nearly empty.
Since the king is locked up in his room, his advisers step into the void and start making decisions. (Not that they’re too upset about that.) They can’t ask the wealthy merchants to pay more since a request like that would prompt the merchants to ask for a seat at the table. And there’s only so much, ahem, power to go around.
The answer, then, is clear: They’ll up the taxes on the common people. Something must make up for the filthy masses that died and the taxes they neglected to pay. The edict is sent out and the tax gatherers set forth.
That’s when the ploughman comes into town. He lost his wife and two children during the plague. And he has struggled and sweat in the years since to simply grow enough food to survive. He has little to give, but he keeps his head down like every other man and woman in the country and lines up to give what little he has.
However, when the taxman growls and threatens the line of peasants, when the king’s guards begin manhandling young girls to check if they’ve “come of age,” something snaps in the ploughman.
“Enough!” the ploughman screams, his rage and grief finally spilling over. He sweeps the taxman’s documents to the ground. “We’ve given you enough!”
That’s when one of the guards hits him, and the ploughman, hardened by years of backbreaking labor, fights back. Within moments, the other peasants join in. The guards are overwhelmed and killed. The taxman runs.
The ploughman, panting and bloody knuckled, suddenly finds himself in a peculiar position. The crowd of farmers and wives, boys and girls, stops and looks to him. They wait for his words. In a short stretch of minutes, the ploughman has become the leader of a rebellion that will quickly spread across the overburdened countryside. It will grow like a wildfire.
People begin to gather with swords, shovels, axes. They talk about and call for freedom. And a man with no name other than “Ploughman” is charged with taking them to the boy king.
Though frankly, the ploughman isn’t quite sure what this freedom might even look like.
The ploughman’s initial outburst was certainly justified. He was trying to protect some young girls from being violated, if nothing else. And later, he does his best to help his fellow commoners seek freedom from tyranny and a fresh new beginning. However, while his intentions were good, the ploughman also tends to stumble along with quite a few deadly and foolish choices. He ends up as a vengeful, angry man. Which isn’t so positive, but it might be seen as a cautionary tale.
The Queen Mother seems to want the best for her son and his kingdom. We overhear her praying as much.
We see the young king and his mother praying several times. The Queen Mother prays, “Show him how to be king.” And Richard confesses to Archbishop Sudbury about his nightmares and fears. “You are chosen by God. Our messiah,” the archbishop tells Richard. “Put your trust in us; we will guide you.” However, all of those prayers don’t seem to impact Richard in any positive way. Thereafter, his choices are quite foul.
A priest named John Ball stirs up a crowd of people, declaring that they should march to London during the Feast of Corpus Christi, and then “God will grant us our own miracle.” We see a large group of believers parading down the streets of London with images and physical representations of Jesus and His sacrifice in hand. People kneel and pray in the streets.
Priests push the ploughman to believe that all the terrible things that have happened—the plague, the kingdom’s onerous abuse—were all a part of God’s plan. The ploughman balks. He can’t believe that God wanted so many to die. And in the same vein, kingdom officials declare that it is God’s will that the rebel forces should be killed. “This is the devil’s work,” one official proclaims.
Riotous crowds storm into several churches, upending pews, smashing crosses and ornaments and dragging priests into the streets. A woman named Alyce joins the forces dragging out wealthy priests. She beats them and screams that they should, “Repent for your sins!”
When King Richard finally faces the angry crowds and hears their demands, he replies, “God hears you. Your king hears you. Your demands will be met.” One of those demands is that the king’s counselors be handed over to the rebels. A former soldier warns the ploughman, “Once we draw blood, we’ll open the gates of hell.”
After a bloody massacre, the young king turns to his horrified mother and asks, “Am I not the king you prayed for? The vanquisher of my enemies? The messiah?”
It becomes evident that the ploughman and Alyce are growing closer and, later, it’s implied that they’ve become a couple. But we only see them hug.
[This section contains spoilers.]
Early on, some guards roughly pull teen girls out of the tax line, slam them up against a wall and drive their hands up under the girls’ skirts to see if they’ve “come of age” and how much they will pay in tax. Later in the film, Alyce tells the ploughman of when she was raped by a monk and how her baby “was ripped” from her.
When the ploughman objects, a king’s guard hits him in the face. The ploughman leaps on the guard and pounds him ruthlessly, turning the guard’s face to a bloody pulp. Other peasant men follow suit.
The next day, the chief justice rides in, and guards seize the ploughman to hang him. The justice declares, “He is your lord. He says pay taxes, and you pay taxes. He says work harder, you work harder!” But a crowd swoops in, frees the ploughman, kills their local lord and all the others but the chief justice. Him they send back to the king with a noose around his neck. The crowd breaks into the lord’s house and burns all his scrolls and records.
Eventually 10,000 people amass from the communities surrounding London. They march, as an army, into the city’s streets, killing any that oppose them.
King Richard faces his greatest fear, going out to speak to the gathered thousands. He agrees to their demands for freedom and free commerce. He even agrees to hand over his power-hungry advisers to the angry masses. Those men are dragged out of London Tower by the raging crowd and beheaded in the streets. The camera gazes in at the gory, blood-spewing results. And then the crowd parades the dead men’s heads around on pikes as they pull additional well-to-do people out of their homes and butcher them, too.
After charters for freedom are drawn up, the king gathers the thousands of rebels into an enclosed courtyard and orders an army of heavily armed troops to kill them all. It’s a long sequence as the disarmed men and women get stabbed, slashed and cut down by horsemen and foot soldiers. The crowd is riddled with scores of arrows. Gore splashes freely. The result is a field full of bloodied corpses.
An unsuspecting man on horseback is attacked and stabbed repeatedly. He eventually dismounts and staggers to a small chapel for aid, dribbling a trail of blood behind him. We see several mano a mano fights between men with swords and the ploughman with his grass scythe. The ploughman slashes a man’s thigh, he swings the blade up into another man’s crotch, pulls the blade back into a foe’s throat, etc.
Characters trade insults and heated threats, but there doesn’t appear to be any foul language in the dialogue. (In fact, sometimes the thick brogue of certain characters makes it difficult to tell what is being said.)
We see young Richard drink a goblet of wine. Another man drinks an ale.
We discover that there have been simmering thoughts of rebellion for some time: The ploughman’s sudden rage was just the lynchpin to stir up the masses and cause a rebellion. Some of the leaders—the priest, John Ball, and former soldier, Wat Tyler—keep pushing the ploughman to the front of the growing army, even though he doesn’t really want to fight. A local priest guilts the ploughman into taking up arms, declaring that the ploughman’s dead family members “will only find rest” if he takes action.
We’ve seen numerous historical fiction films in the past that have attempted to make statements about an oppressive ruling class. They’re pics that encourage modern viewers to consider the disparity between the wealthy and the poor, the privileged and the downtrodden—and then declare that all should stand against injustice.
The Uprising is writer-director Paul Greengrass’ gritty and brutal stab at that agitprop conceit. He creates a grimy, medieval world filled with heartless royals and screaming, maltreated masses with scythes and plowshares clutched in their fists.
However, rather than emotionally stirring its audience with a compelling good-versus-evil tale, The Uprising and its frenetic skirmishes (awash with thickly accented, overlapping, hard-to-understand dialogue) feel opaque and confusing. When raging mobs begin beheading anybody and everybody in the bloody streets of London, even the “common man” appears foul. Everyone in this feudal world is broken and cruel.
And perhaps that is the one point that a thoughtful person can take away from this film: Mankind is fallen and fitful, no matter what their station in life. We all need something to pull us up out of the muck of life and help guide us to better choices.
Unfortunately, The Uprising doesn’t actually get to that conclusion. It doesn’t earnestly point to the divine or any other positive. It simply ends in blood-spattered revenge and a nightmare-plagued man’s screams.
If that description makes you think that this film is bloody and dark and unfulfilling … then at least I’ve made my point.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
