There’s a reason Andrew Garfield looks so annoyed for the whole two hours of The Uprising, Paul Greengrass’s first foray into full-on period drama.
I felt for him. Garfield is one of my favourite actors and Greengrass one of my favourite directors. I imagined Andrew on the phone to his agent: ‘What the f*ck? When you said I was going to be in a Paul Greengrass movie I thought, cool, like Jason Bourne… YOU NEVER MENTIONED HESSIAN!!!’
You have to feel sorry for him. He must have been itching like shit for at least two months while they were shooting this. My god there’s a LOT of hessian in this movie.
On the plus side we can all agree that Tom Hollander as an evil King’s Counsellor snarling: ‘Crush them!!!’ is worth the price of admission on its own.
It was hard not to be aroused by that. Especially as it is evenly intoned, unlike the rest of the faux olde worlde expositional dialogue which is either mumbled unintelligibly or SHOUTED AT THE TOP OF THE ACTORS’ VOICES!!!!!!!
But if hessian and scowling is your sort of thing, then I wish you well, but don’t forget to take motion sickness pills because we all know how much Paul G loves a bit of jiggly wiggly jolly wolty camerawork.
In conclusion, I’m not sure if this is a spoiler or not (given how much coverage it has already had), but in a surreal historical twist at the end, Garfield’s generically christened ‘Ploughman’ turns into Robin Hood of all people… which was a real disappointment because I was hoping he would invent a type of 1980s pub lunch.
