Andrew Garfield’s charisma can’t save Paul Greengrass’s grim and depressingly generic period piece
Hollywood loves giving young actors their own historical epic as much as audiences seem to dislike watching them. Timothée Chalamet and Chris Pine’s least remembered roles are in the medieval set films The King and Outlaw King (no relation), Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel made back only a third of its $100m budget and earlier this year, the Saudi-backed seventh-century drama Desert Warrior starring Anthony Mackie and Ben Kingsley quietly became one of the biggest flops of all time. Last week, it was reported that Scott blamed the failure of Gladiator II on Paul Mescal not being “masculine enough” in a logical leap which only makes sense if your barometer for masculinity is a man who throws hotel phones and yells at producers in storage closets.
On paper, The Uprising should be different: it’s a historical epic from a blue-chip director (the Bourne trilogy’s Paul Greengrass), a nuanced, introspective leading man (Andrew Garfield) and a milieu that uncomfortably chimes with the western world’s backslide into repressive authoritarianism (The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381). In reality, it is a disjointed slog through the mud with the emotional depth of a History Channel rerun.
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