‘The Uprising’ review: History finds its pulse

A dramatization of the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt, The Uprising trades textbook dust for genuine adrenaline.

Period dramas have a reputation problem. Say the words “14th century England” and most people picture stiff dialogue, muddy fields, and a runtime that feels twice as long as the actual medieval era it’s depicting. The Uprising knows that reputation exists, and spends its runtime gleefully torching it. Written and directed by Paul Greengrass, the film dramatizes the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt — the uprising of English farmers and laborers against a crushing tax and a corrupt ruling class under the boy king Richard II — and behaves less like a history lesson and more like a chase movie that happens to be wearing a doublet. It shouldn’t work as well as it does. It works anyway.

Walking in, the marketing gives you almost nothing to go on beyond the setting and the cast, which turns out to be the right call. What unfolds is a surprisingly propulsive account of one of England’s first real uprisings against the crown, filtered through a lens that owes as much to modern action filmmaking as it does to any Merchant Ivory production. The result is a film that’s difficult to categorize and even harder to look away from.

Garfield finds a new gear.

Most people’s mental image of Andrew Garfield still starts and ends with a red-and-blue suit, and that’s exactly the image The Uprising blows up. Playing a nameless farmer who becomes the reluctant spark of a rebellion, Garfield delivers (Spider-Man aside) what might be the most physically committed performance of his career. He’s not playing a saint or a symbol here, he’s playing a man pushed past the point of patience, and Garfield lets you watch that transformation happen in real time. There’s a wiry, coiled energy to him in the film’s back half that feels genuinely new, and a world away from the wisecracking web-slinger most audiences know him for.

What’s most impressive is how Garfield keeps the character grounded even as the film around him escalates. He never tips into caricature, never plays the “rousing speech” moments the way a lesser actor would milk them. Instead he underplays exactly when you expect him to go big, which somehow makes the big moments land even harder when they arrive. He’s surrounded by a strong ensemble, too — Jamie Bell brings a quiet moral fire to the preacher John Ball, and Cosmo Jarvis is magnetic as the rebellion’s de facto general, Wat Tyler. Together the three of them give the uprising a face on every side of it: the everyman, the believer, and the strategist.

Photo Credit: Focus Features

The action doesn’t know how to sit still.

If you’ve built up an assumption that a film about medieval England means long, static shots of fields and candlelit rooms, throw it out. The Uprising barely lets you catch your breath. The set pieces come early, come often, and rarely repeat themselves — a tense standoff gives way to a horse-and-carriage chase through the countryside, which gives way to something closer to a brawl, which gives way to a full-scale clash between the peasant army and the king’s mounted men bearing down on them. That last dynamic becomes the film’s signature image: the rich and powerful, literally on horseback, running down the people beneath them. The choreography favors clarity over chaos, which is a relief; you always know where people are and what’s at stake, even when the camera is moving fast.

That clarity extends to the plotting as a whole. Revolt narratives can get tangled fast: factions splinter, allegiances shift, historical context piles up. The screenplay here does an admirable job of keeping the through-line simple. You never need a scorecard to remember who’s who or why they’re fighting. It’s a small thing, but it’s the kind of small thing that a lot of historical epics get wrong, and its absence here is noticeable in the best way.

The twist nobody asked for: it’s actually a drama.

Here’s the strange trick The Uprising pulls off: for a film sold on spectacle, its most memorable stretches are the quiet ones. Underneath the sword fights and the chases is a genuinely felt period drama about class, betrayal, and the cost of standing up to power, and the film earns those beats rather than just checking the box. It’s the kind of tonal left turn that could easily feel bolted on, but here it’s woven in from the start, so that by the time the film slows down to let its characters actually talk to each other, it doesn’t feel like a detour. It feels like the point.

That balance — relentless momentum paired with real emotional stakes — is the film’s best trick, and honestly, its most surprising one.

Photo Credit: Betina La Plante/Focus Features.

If The Uprising has a real flaw, it’s that it doesn’t seem to know when to stop proving itself. At roughly two and a half hours, the film is packed with momentum, but that starts to work against the movie in its back stretch, when a couple of sequences that reinforce points the story has already made linger a beat or two longer than necessary. None of it is bad, exactly, it’s more that a tighter edit would have turned a very good film into a genuinely great one. There’s a leaner cut of The Uprising somewhere in here, and you can feel it straining to get out.

The bottom line.

The Uprising takes a piece of history that could have easily been flattened into a dry costume drama and instead turns it into something urgent, physical, and unexpectedly moving. Garfield anchors it with a performance that finds new range for him, the action rarely lets up, and the story never loses you even as it juggles a lot of moving pieces. Trim twenty minutes and this is close to a knockout. As it stands, it’s still one of the more purely entertaining period pieces to come along in a while.

The Uprising hits theaters Thursday, September 10. Watch the trailer below.

Images courtesy of Betina La Plante/Focus Features.

Alyshia Kelly

Alyshia is the Interviews Editor for InBetweenDrafts. A self-proclaimed pop culture enthusiast, she watches B-movies in her spare time and hopes to make one some day. Apart from writing, she is a publicist fully immersed in the world of entertainment.