Scuppered by the marketing department, this upscale actioner applies the director's signature documentary-inspired technique to a grim chapter of 14th-century history.
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Focus Features Among medieval hand-held farming tools, the sickle is your best bet for reaping. It’s also just the thing for deadly weaponry in times of a peasant revolt, especially one momentous enough to earn capital letters and its own year marker — the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, for instance. In “The Uprising,” which doesn’t quite come together but has its earnest compensations, a stoic Andrew Garfield is first seen in a field against a smudge of gray sky, his farmland barely producing a crop. Garfield’s character is the Ploughman, no stranger to grief. His family has been wiped out in the Plague, along with half of England. Gaunt and spent, he speaks little and has less. But in the brave heart of this fictional protagonist, there lurks a righteous threshing machine, ripe for a Great Rebellion in writer-director Paul Greengrass’ latest feature. This is a filmmaker whose high-end work has meant a great deal to many over the last generation. The clear-eyed, masterfully chaotic docudramas “Bloody Sunday” (dramatizing the 1972 massacre of peace protesters in Londonderry, Northern Ireland) and “United 93” (recounting the 9/11 terrorist attacks, painfully and indelibly); “Captain Phillips,” nearly as good, with Tom Hanks in charge even when he falls apart at last — these films look better every year.
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