With a deep sigh of a bungee jumper about to take the plunge, we wiped the the dust off the Blu-Ray and hunkered down for 3 hours and 15 minutes.......we even selected the daffy 'Roadshow' option, which includes an overture and intermission music......(we'd love to know who in the hell thought this movie would revive the 'Roadshow' format, which the big studios murdered (along with their own financial bottom lines) with their ghastly parade of disastrous three hour 'Sound Of Music' wanna-be's throughout the l960's....)
First thought that came to mind: why anyone in their right mind would pay for an overpriced Multiplex ticket to see a Ridley Scott movie is beyond us.......when invariably, a few months later, Scott's voluminous 'Director's Cut' would appear on video, with vast amounts of previously deleted footage re-inserted to at least make the story coherent......
So here we have Sir Ridley's epic take on the Crusades, which contrary to what many people expected, had neither Christians or Muslims howling for his blood. Whatever faint praise "Kingdom Of Heaven" collected came from its fairly distanced, dispassionate approach to history's most titanic battle of ideologies. Hey, Fox News, here's what 'fair and balanced' really looks like......
The closest thing you have to a villain here, if you insist on having one in your costume epics, are those wacky true believers, the Templar knights.......they're almost as bad in this movie as those skeletal Templars who ride around in the cheapo Spanish horror movies, chasing after screaming hot babes.....
This balanced approach can't come as any surprise......who thought Ridley Scott could possibly craft a film where content mattered over the visuals? While other directors might have dug deep into the overwhelming drama of a clash of civilizations, Scott has nothing on his mind other than making it all look pretty......every landscape, every battle, every storm at sea is suitable for framing......no politics, just portraiture.
If that's all you expect out of a Crusades movie.....gorgeously composed shots of Christians and Muslims turning each other into deli meat with their broadswords, then you can easily lose yourself in Scott's meticulously re-created Holy Land. Periodically, you can shake your head from time to time and mutter, "wow......things haven't changed much in a thousand years, have they?".....but you won't pick that vibe up from Ridley's direction......that thought doesn't even occur to the movie until a tag line right before the credits roll.....
What truly relegated Scott's grand vision to quick obscurity was his lethal choice of Orlando Bloom as his lead actor. With a skilled, charismatic actor as an anchor, the film might have had a fighting chance to engage and grip an audience. Instead, Scott chose to construct all this massive world-building around Bloom, a generic, uninteresting non-entity of a performer......Bloom aimlessly wanders through this movie like a stand-in for a superstar who never showed up.....
To the BQ's enormous disappointment, the inside of the Blu-Ray case didn't include a coupon for a free "I Survived the "Kingdom Of Heaven" Director's Cut" T-shirt......or action figures with removable heads and limbs if you want to stage your own Crusade.....so we can only award two broadswords...(**).....if there's ever a threatened 5 hour Ultimate Director's Cut.....we'll pass.
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