Andrew Garfield’s fictional ploughman joins the historical heroes of the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt in a dirt-caked, docudrama-style film with disconcertingly silly moments

Paul Greengrass has in fact already made his “uprising” film: United 93, the gut-wrenching 2006 masterpiece about the passengers onboard United Airlines flight 93 who rose up against the 9/11 hijackers and prevented them from hitting their destination and causing fatalities – except, that is, for those onboard the plane. Greengrass’s new movie, shot in his distinctive handheld, docu-reportage style, is notionally about the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt, in which Wat Tyler and John Ball became legendary for leading an insurrection against the cruel poll tax of Richard II. Or at least … it sort of is. Because the film, in a disconcertingly silly way, imagines the uprising as an origin myth for Robin Hood, or at least someone who’s supposed to be more or less Robin Hood – because that’s not what he’s called and the dates don’t quite match up.

Ex-soldier Tyler and radical preacher Ball, capably played by Cosmo Jarvis and Jamie Bell, are joined by a third fictional hero, apparently destined later to canter through the forest with a wealth-redistribution plan. He is a ploughman, known simply as “Ploughman”, played by Andrew Garfield; grieving the loss of his wife and children to the plague and sickened by the tax collectors’ greed and brutality, he instigates an insurrection that soon merges into other outbreaks of revolutionary rage. This involves rivers of smudgy-faced folk in rough clothes descending on the capital from all directions, to demand concessions from the king to whom they are still loyal and believe to have been misled by advisers.