A Robin Hood origin story–kind of, sorta
⭐⭐⭐Rating: 3 out of 4
The latest action flick from “Jason Bourne” director Paul Greengrass has been marred by a marketing fumble that hailed the movie as a Robin Hood origin story. “Witness the rise of Robin Hood,” was the mid-summer tagline until Focus Features caught flack — too much of a spoiler, and not the story’s focus — and walked it back. Now that the cat’s out of the bag, the reveal of Andrew Garfield’s rebel Ploughman as Robin Hood arrives late in the movie, as a semi-gotcha. But it’s really a non-issue since “Uprising” works on its own as a period piece about the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt in England, Robin Hood subtitle or not. It takes place after the Black Death of the mid-1300s, when half the population has been wiped out. Fourteen-year-old King Richard II (Woody Norman, foppishly excellent as the effete and conniving overload) and his court of corrupt advisors are economically squeezing peasants and serfs under the Poll Tax to finance the ongoing war with France and the lush life of the royals. Commoners must toil under inhumane conditions and give up all they reap to the king — resist and die. During one such incursion, a peasant wanting to hold reserves to feed his family is beaten, which is when Garfield’s Ploughman (that is all he is called) wades in and gives it back fist-for-fist. The film frames this as a major galvanizing point in the sweeping peasant uprising led by Wat Tyler (Cosmo Jarvis) and monk John Ball (Jamie Bell). Ball and Tyler were real historical figures; Garfield’s working man is loosely pulled from William Langland’s “Piers Plowman” — the OG Robin Hood — which was put down on paper around the same time as the plague and revolt. Other (later) tellings of Robin Hood — the ones that begat Errol Flynn’s randy forest romp of 1938 and Ridley Scott’s 2010 redux starring Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett — placed the cloaked outlaw further back in time (1199/1200) with King Richard the Lionheart (Richard I), King John, and the Sheriff of Nottingham as the faces of tyranny.
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