Kingdom of Heaven - Austin American-Statesman

'Kingdom of Heaven' is an empty epic

By CHRIS GARCIA
Austin American-Statesman

Ridley Scott is a supreme imagemaker, capable of rendering the gruesome gorgeous and carnage cool. When he has a story to work with ("Alien," "Blade Runner," "Gladiator"), Scott is also a pungent yarn spinner. But the slick image remains his thing, demonstrated in the bloody but bloodless "Kingdom of Heaven," his and writer William Monahan's tiresomely routine epic set amid the 12th-century Crusades, when killing in the name of God was in vogue. A bit like now.

20th Century Fox

'Kingdom of Heaven'

2 out of 5 stars

Director: Ridley Scott
Starring: Orlando Bloom, Liam Neeson, Jeremy Irons, Eva Green, Martin Hancock, Michael Sheen, Nathalie Cox
Run time: 145 minutes
Release date: May 6, 2005
Rating: R for strong violence and epic warfare.
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The movie shimmers with striking tableaus: Men riddled with arrows become shambling porcupines; seas of warriors clash in clangorous waves; and blossoms of fresh blood, flying slowly in perfect shiny beads, bring to mind nothing so much as an Ocean Spray commercial. In recent years Scott has used his unflinching and flowery manner to dramatize violent historical events. He's seduced by clanking instruments of death, fiery explosions, the occasional dismemberment — masculine brutality striving for heroic poetry. Scott spies history and smells blood.

"Kingdom of Heaven" stars Orlando Bloom — he of the collective female swoon — as a scruffy blacksmith in a pastoral French village that's roughly the size of a suburban back yard. Little does he know that upon the surprise arrival of his estranged father, battle-scarred knight Godfrey of Ibelin (Liam Neeson), he will rocket from God-fearing craftsman to a pious, humorless warrior bent on protecting ancient Jerusalem from Saladin's Muslim armies. It happens absurdly fast, without the narrative sinew of character development or depth. This isn't hero-making; it's hero rubber-stamping.

It's also a problem, though a predictable one in the cynical context of the American blockbuster. You only have to note his rock-star hair and seven-day stubble to know Bloom's Balian will surmount greatness in a single bound. One moment he's smelting in a shack, the next he's being knighted and wooing the Queen of Jerusalem (Eva Green) away from the war-drunk king, Guy de Lusignan (Marton Csokas). When his father dies, Balian picks up where he left off, in total righteous lordliness. He radiates the fumes of his father, a rich, knee-buckling fragrance that makes men bow, women flirt, and lands him an excellent table at dinner.

Balian and his fellow Crusaders clomp to the Holy Land on horseback, and Scott is nice enough to telescope this massive journey into several minutes. Once there, the camera soars and caresses Scott's digitally imagined Jerusalem, circa 1190. Like the re-created Rome in "Gladiator," the desert city looks like a vast matte painting, its thickets of boxy beige buildings and serpentine souks teeming with extras, the orange sky aflutter with computer-animated birds.

There's a certain dissonance watching clanky medieval knights in chain mail march through Judea's sunbaked sandopolis among robed and besandaled Muslims. It's as though two time-machines, one from dark-ages Europe and one from ancient Palestine, collided and mingled their passenger loads to calamitous effect.

Scott offers sound bite history, a brisk overview of the delicate peace holding in Jerusalem when Balian arrives. The religious politics are, of course, enormously complex and entrenched, and the film presses timely buttons of holy war and infidel invaders, which gently but effectively resonate. The three occupying religions — Judaism, Islam, Christianity — are treated equitably. Fanaticism is carefully denounced. When Muslim worshippers chant, "Praise be to God," Bloom replies, "Sounds like our prayers." He throws a knowing look that's practically a wink to the audience.

Lurching under the historical epic's requisite load of gravitas and bombast, "Kingdom of Heaven" hews tediously to the genre's frayed formula. Only the setting is fresh, but the novelty gives way to soulless carnage and an emotionally neutered story of faith, duty and, just barely, romance. (Green is more apparition than presence.) There is absolutely nothing interesting in Scott's approach; it is workmanlike, or, more to the point, hacklike.

It remains up in the air if Bloom's stiff, three-expression performance is actually acting. He provides the skin and bones to the role, but the filmmakers have abandoned him on the meat part. He is a living hero in concept only.

Who surely do act, and beautifully, are Neeson, Jeremy Irons (as level-headed Tiberias) and David Thewlis, who was so corrosively brilliant in Mike Leigh's "Naked" and brings to the movie a caustic eloquence and humor — some much-needed bite.

Despite a fierce performance that feels burned into stone, Neeson emanates the faint imperial whiff that he can't wait to get out of there, which he does soon enough. But he doesn't leave before delivering the movie's early show-stopping line: "I once fought two days with an arrow through my testicle."

On the far-fetched assumption that this becomes a date movie, expect at that moment a communal cringe from exactly half the audience.