‘Uprising’ review: a tale of doomed friendship loses focus halfway through

Against the backdrop of mass discontent with the monarch, a slave rebellion in Joseon and a foreign invasion, a regal estate burns. A slave slated for the gallows, desperately searches for his master and friend amidst the chaos, but only finds the latter’s wife and son. He rushes forward to save them, but she would rather die a painful death than be saved by a slave. Such are the extremes that punctuate writers Park Chan-wook and Shin Chul and director Kim Sang-man’s Uprising, the story of a doomed friendship that blooms and withers in a time mired by class divide, social rebellion and war.

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Cheon-yeong (Gang Dong-won) is a commoner-turned-slave forced to be a body double for Yi Jeong-ryeo (Park Jeong-min), the son of a powerful and influential noble family; he is subjected to lashes and whipping every time the young master struggles in his swordsmanship classes. Despite the obvious social chasm between them, the two become friends. Eventually, when the kind Jeong-ryeo struggles to clear his military examinations, the ambitious Cheon-yeong offers to stand in for him one last time, in return, Jeong-ryeo’s father would free him from slavery.

Predictably, Jeong-ryeo’s father reneges on his word and sentences Cheon-yeong to death, but the looming Japanese invasion brings about a mutiny in the household before it can happen. The slaves murder Jeong-ryeo’s parents, and his wife and son are unfortunate victims, but the biggest blow is his friend’s supposed betrayal. As the nation plunges into war, the “smokeless fire” of revenge and bloodthirst simmers inside him, coming to a head seven years later when his friend returns as a war hero.

Had Uprising focused a little more on the turmoil and fallout of the misinterpreted betrayal, it would be easier to engage fully with the movie. However, the film stretches itself thin trying to establish the fallacies of social enclosures in Joseon, following a narcissistic king blind to anything other than his lofty ideas of monarchy, alongside the threat of constant clashes with the Japanese. At times, it feels as if the story puts the titular characters on the backburner, before suddenly remembering who the conflict is all about.

The switch between a bird’s eye view of the nation and the emotional microcosm of Cheon-yeong and Jeong-ryeo’s personal trials gets exhausting fairly quickly. It also does no favours to Park Jeong-min and Gang Dong-won. Confined to their own silos until the end – most of their story plays out through flashbacks – their enmity never quite reaches the crescendo expected, instead disappearing into a sea of literal mist towards the climax. Despite social inequality feeding into the central dispute between two friends who dared to bridge the divide, it feels as if there are two separate stories running in parallel.

Uprising, though, does revel in Park Chan-wook’s direct – and often crude – style. It eschews deifying the characters, instead underlining the tale with a fatigue that stems from circumstantial duty rather than purpose. Director Kim also loves his ironies and visual juxtapositions – there is always a sword that is destined for someone’s head, plus comical contrasts between the plenty of the “destitute” king and the masses who resort to eating corpses because of ensuing famine. Despite the peaks, Uprising would have benefited from a shorter runtime and a more focused lens – and perhaps less severed noses.

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