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Remember Ridley Scott's "Gladiator"? Sure, it had its problems - Joaquin Phoenix's dopey pouting being a large one - but, man, that was a blast. Five years down the line, will anyone remember Scott's "Kingdom of Heaven"? Hopefully not.
"Kingdom of Heaven" is a purportedly balanced look at the period between the second and third crusades. Christians and Muslims lived quasi-harmoniously, ruling Jerusalem in a brotherhood of chivalry ... except for those religious fanatics who wanted it all for themselves.
Enter Orlando Bloom as Balian, the illegitimate son of Liam Neeson's Godfrey, the former protector of Jerusalem against intolerance and non-pragmatic religious ideals. The movie opens as Balian mourns his wife's suicide while, around the corner, a priest robs her grave. Neeson tries desperately to convince Balian to follow him to Jerusalem and reclaim his birthright. No one seems to care about the fact that Godfrey abandoned Balian - unless you can interpret Bloom's ubiquitous and unsympathetic blank stoicism as a reaction - but Balian is still in mourning, so he remains behind.
But then the priest makes the poor choice of taunting Balian with his wife's stolen crucifix - he doesn't need it since they had to cut off her head and send her suicidal soul to hell. Balian throws the priest into a furnace and reclaims the burning crucifix. When he catches up with his father and confesses that he is a murderer, Godfrey only says, "Aren't we all?"
I go into such detail here because that's all you need to watch of the movie in order to understand its point. Kill all you want for ideals - so long as they're not religious.
OK, Ridley Scott has a good idea. Religious dogma in the Middle East is dangerous. Check. But that doesn't make a movie. Hell, it doesn't even make for an interesting argument.
The rest of the movie follows suit: Things happen to Balian and he turns out to be, however boringly aloof, a good guy. But he never reacts with passion - his face moves less than the silver mask covering the leprous king. And he never really does anything either.
The only thing Balian really does is turn down an opportunity to become king, because it would mean killing the next man in line - who, by the way, is the evil Guy de Lusigan and will eventually start the war leading to the deaths of thousands - and marrying his wife, Sybilla.
Other than that, the movie espouses pragmatism as a doctrine. The Holy Land is the New World, full of business opportunities. There's no need to possess Jerusalem when you can share it. When you're in the desert, look for water instead of glory. But for some reason that has no explanation outside of a plot contrivance. Balian ignores Sybilla's advice that "Someday you will regret not having done a little evil to prevent a great one."
Balian's poor planning gives him the opportunity to make several - um, rousing? - political speeches that run along the lines of "Who has claim [to Jersualem]? No one. Everyone." But the speeches serve mostly to inspire the Bishop of Jerusalem to proclaim "Blasphemy!" or to suggest "We could flee now."
"And what about the people" Balian asks. The bishop's answer: "Well, there is that."
Yeah, there is that. In case you forgot, we don't like religious people.
Not just Christians, either. The ostensible heroes of the Muslim camp are Saladin and Nasir, who want to end the war, but are pressured to continue fighting by their own zealots. Except, we learn that in order to gain control of the Muslims, Saladin has promised to retake Jerusalem. Well, no Muslim's perfect.
My problem with all this is only partly content-based. The movie tries to pass itself off as balanced but instead just antagonizes religion and still allocates all the bloated screen time and the miniscule emotional resonance to the Christians. Don't expect to mourn too much for the faceless infidels storming the walls of Jerusalem.
My bigger problem is that Scott has removed any emotional conflict. He's tried to create ambivalence and wound up with indifference. The battles are, as can be expected from Scott, huge, intense and bloody. But at the end of the day, his trademark slowdown shots just give you time to think, "Why should I care?"
In "Gladiator," Scott tells essentially the same story: Man is invested with control of an empire; power is wrested away by megalomaniac; megalomaniac (or his ideological brethren) take away the stoic hero's loved ones; stoic hero restores balance.
But Russell Crowe can play stoicism. Bloom looks like he's stuck as Legolas or blacksmith Will Turner from "Pirates of the Caribbean." He's a kid that excels at lightly gliding past Orcs' swords or through love stories, but he can't hack emotional torture.
The only people you wind up rooting for are the villains. At least they're excited in their zealotry. Brendan Gleeson as Reynald the Templar actually does a little dance in his jail cell when he finds out the old king is dead and he is free to attack the Muslims.
Neeson dies too early, but he delivers the best line of the movie, proving he's ever so much more hardcore than his bastard son: "I once fought two days with an arrow in my testicle." Yeah? Well, I sat through two-and-a-half hours of "Kingdom of Heaven."
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