It looks like "Gladiator". It sounds like "Gladiator". It's directed by the guy who made "Gladiator". So why is it so dull? Blame a tedious, unmotivated story that wanders from one contrived scene to the next without any sense of order or purpose. As one friend put it, "It's like watching the daily rushes from a movie that's still in production." It's a damn shame because what the writer and director were clearly trying for here is something of a cinematic Trojan horse, not unlike "Three Kings": a message-movie disguised as an action-adventure. But "Kingdom of Heaven" ends up betraying both its genre and audience expectations. The trick with a Trojan horse movie is to make it ostensibly about something else, but this one fails because its radical intentions just aren't well enough disguised. Full credit to Ridley and crew for having a go, but with the exception of some marvellous CGI set pieces near the end and one or two good lines, the result is so miserably boring that all the effort is wasted and the message along with it. In the urge to push an agenda, they forgot to tell a story. Drama is about conflict, and you can't have that in a movie that simply refuses to pick a side. What does Orlando Bloom's Balian stand for? What does he want? What is he risking his life to achieve? He's nominally a Christian but seems essentially a liberal humanist, all too aware of the stupidity of fighting over a piece of ground that opposing religious traditions both imbue with spurious sanctity. He initially sets off to save his wife's soul from Hell, but then ditches all conviction when the chance to bed a fine wench comes along. In the end, he fights to save "the people", no matter what they happen to believe. Cut the soaring music and strip away William Monahan's fatuous phrasing and the knight's pledge pretty much comes down to, "Can't we all just get along?" A wonderful sentiment - and one the inhabitants of present-day Jerusalem would do well to heed - but a sword-and-sandals epic about the Crusades is hardly the place for it, not if you want the story to be engaging. If Ridley Scott wants to push liberal humanist ecumenism - and it certainly does need to be pushed - then his $130m budget might have been better spent on putting a copy of Tariq Ali's "The Clash of Fundamentalisms" into every American classroom. Now that would create some real drama.
Review of Kingdom of Heaven
