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But unlike the battles of the "Lord of the Rings" movies, these "historical" skirmishes have little gravity. This is muddled and oppressive storytelling (the script is by William Monahan) dotted with elaborate but weightless battle sequences: The rallying cries of the various warring factions, their noble sacrifices, their sheer numbers - all of it seems carefully calculated by Scott to fool us into thinking we're not in the Middle East but in Middle Earth. "Kingdom of Heaven" is a similar test of fortitude. To break up the endless sword clanging and arrow slinging, characters utter jaunty lines like "The blacksmith is the man you seek!" "So - how find you Jerusalem?" and, my personal favorite, "I once fought two days with an arrow through my testicle."
#Kingdom of heaven wiki film movie#
What's more, it's so hard to follow what's going on in these battles (as well as exactly why they're happening in the first place) that they turn the movie into one long gray smudge of action with some talking in between.
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Great clashes ensue: There are so many battles in "Kingdom of Heaven" that it's easy to lose track of them. So Balian sets out for Jerusalem, eventually meeting a leper king in a silver mask - that would be the enlightened Christian King Baldwin IV, played with great vocal authority by Edward Norton - as well as various European crusader types intent on destroying the fragile peace in the Holy Land, which is due largely to the restraint of the sensible and intelligent Muslim leader Saladin (played with charismatic dignity by Ghassan Massoud).
Godfrey happens to be Balian's dad (he did a lot of tomcattin' around in his youth), and he has just the ticket to cheer Balian up: Why not join the religious wars raging in the far-off Holy Land? Normally, a quick trip to Vegas would do the trick, but bullying fellow humans into Christian conversion will do in a pinch. Balian loses his temper and kills him.įortunately, a great knight on his way back from fighting in the East (Neeson's Godfrey) has just stopped by Balian's town. But his child has died, and his wife has committed suicide what's more, a corrupt priest has just swung by the blacksmith shop to let him know that his wife, having taken her own life, is damned to hell. (When wise elder warrior Godfrey of Ibelin, played by Liam Neeson, knighted him with a slap on the face, I wanted to cry out, "Arise, Sir Loin of Beef!") In the beginning, Balian is just a humble blacksmith, plying his trade in his homeland of France. Orlando Bloom plays 12th century crusader Balian of Ibelin. Like "Troy," "Alexander" and "The Last Samurai," Ridley Scott's "Kingdom of Heaven" is another boy's-book adventure movie dressed up as a grown man's epic - it's far too little for its britches.