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PLOT: In the time of the Second Crusade, a young blacksmith discovers he's a knight by birth, commits a rash act and heads to Jerusalem to heal his soul. There he finds himself mired in cynical religious politics, brutish skirmishes and finally a last stand against the forces of the legendary Muslim warrior Saladin.
What may be the most stolidly unnecessary line of crawl in movie history presents itself just before the end credits in Ridley Scott's Crusades bloodfest, Kingdom Of Heaven.
Against the smoldering ruins of Jerusalem, it reads, "A thousand years later, peace still eludes the Middle East."
Oh yeah, the Middle East. I think I read about that somewhere.
You get a pretty good idea of Scott's modern-day politics in Kingdom Of Heaven, his gritty, dusty followup of sorts to Gladiator, with all its bloodletting and twice the contemporary contentiousness (Rome's occupation of Gaul just doesn't have the same resonance as Palestine).
What it means in terms of neat, bloody storytelling is that a revenge tale (Gladiator avenges dead wife and child) makes a much neater package than um, well, let's see.
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Kingdom Of Heaven begins in the 12th century and introduces us to Balian (Orlando Bloom) a blacksmith mourning his wife's suicide. In his grief, he's met by a group of Crusaders, led by one Godfrey (Liam Neeson), who turns out to be Balian's long lost father. Godfrey offers Balian a chance to defend the faith in Christian-occupied Jerusalem.
Balian passes but changes his mind after he is provoked to murder a priest. He joins his father's quest through bloody skirmish after bloody skirmish -- then on to Jerusalem, there to find absolution for murder and for his wife's soul. This is the point in the film where I realized I can't really watch medieval knights traipsing along on a quest without expecting to see Terry Gilliam bringing up the rear banging coconuts.
What Balian finds in the Holy City is a motley lot of Christians -- a good bunch, led by the masked leper king Baldwin (Edward Norton) who believe in co-existing with the Muslim population as a beacon for all humanity, and the nasty Templars who want nothing less than all-out war with those same infidels. (A number of historians have scoffed at scriptwriter William Monaghan's notion of a society of Jerusalem peaceniks).
As the Muslim hero Saladin (Ghassan Massoud) and his 200,000 warriors loom, Balian is offered the chance to marry Baldwin's sister Sibylla (Eva Green) and have her Templar husband Guy de Lusignan (Marton Csokas) executed for treason. He demurs, for reasons of piety (though he's already slept with her, so um, what the heck?)
All this is by way of warmup for the siege of Jerusalem that makes up the last half-hour of the movie. It's a pretty wicked, sprawling battle as these things go, straight out of Lord Of The Rings with fireballs, crossbows, bloody hand-to-hand and wall-ascending soldiers doused in burning tar. It's hard to know who to root for, since the Muslims all seem like pretty decent fellows.
Oh well, I guess we'll just root for the underdogs. You might try that with the Middle East now. Tell me if it works for you.
(This film is rated 14-A)