Publisher: CinemaSerf October 10, 2026
Hot on the heels of the 14th century great plague that killed almost half of the English population, the young and troubled King Richard II (Woody Norman) is being governed by his greedy nobles and clergy. Their actions result in his people being left exposed to the cruelty of their taxation agents and often they are no longer left with enough to live on or to feed their families. One such farmer (Andrew Garfield) decides that enough is enough and violently rebels against the authority of the Chief Justice (Stanley Townsend). Pretty swiftly he discovers that he isn't alone. His Essex-men are sooned joined by many from Kent - led by Wat Tyler (Cosmo Jarvis) and John Ball (Jamie Bell) who determine to march to London to put their case before the King. That's quite a risky strategy as they have no idea if the King will manage to pull himself together enough to see and/or engage with them or will he, too, end up being manipulated by the likes of his Archbishop (Stephen Dillane - whom I could have sworn was Rupert Everett) and his duplicitious treasurer (Tom Hollander)? What takes over now is a rather pedestrian delivery of a turbulent period in history that I felt never quite hit the mark and the style of the photography also started to get under my skin a bit, too. Why did it constantly have to be moving? Much of this is shot as if we are up close and personal with the characters or amidst the conflict, but often I felt as if I was observing whilst hopping from foot to foot, or constantly moving around the object to no obvious or beneficial purpose and after a while I just wanted to get out of this particular wind tunnel and let the historical aspects more stably play out. On that front Garfield and Jarvis deliver competently and Norman quite ably presents something of the vulerabilities that Richard II later become famed for, but Bell was curiously out of sorts and though the production design does convince us of something of the lives of the poverty-stricken agrarian population, the film really never quite settles down to anything much more than a decently funded tea-time television costume drama - a bit like "The King" (2019). I was disappointed, but I did still quite enjoy it and it does need to been screen in a cinema if you're to get the full value from the set-piece scenes. It will look very ordinary on the television.