Kingdom of Heaven (review)
Good Knight, Sweet Prince
Okay, baron, actually. Orlando Bloom plays a baron, a medieval French baron. But still. Yum. I’m sorry — I can’t help it. He’s beautiful. So, I’m shallow. I admit it. He’s gorgeous, and any hotblooded heterosexual woman who denies she’s going to see Kingdom of Heaven just because Orlando Bloom is in it is lying, I tell ya: lying. Or else she’s a medieval scholar and wants to see how Hollywood gets it all wrong. But even that woman is going to Not Care how wrong it might be when he strides across the screen all long and lanky and swings a sword and gets all angst-
Look: this is why we go to the movies. We don’t expect movies to be history lessons or graduate dissertations, and anyone who looks for that from Hollywood is a fool. Is there stuff that’s historically inaccurate with Kingdom of Heaven? Probably. The friend I attended the screening with, who’s something of a scholar of medieval stuff herself, pointed out some details that were just plain wrong — things from minor embellishments on swords that would not have yet been developed in the 12th century to political peculiarities of certain religious orders that had long since been abandoned — but even she was pretty much reduced to a puddle of goo by the closing credits. And not just by Orlando Bloom. There’s also Liam Neeson and Alexander Siddig (Reign of Fire, Vertical Limit) — who used to be called Siddig el Fadil when he was on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and if his change of name isn’t a devastating commentary on intolerance and racism in even supposedly liberal Hollywood, I dunno what is — and Jeremy Irons (Being Julia, The Merchant of Venice) and poor David Thewlis (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Timeline) who just because he doesn’t look like a model almost always gets shuffled into bad-
I’m not immune to the other things at work — I’d hardly have been at this for all these years if all I had to say was “Ohmigod he’s so cuuuuuute!” — and certainly my brain and not just other organs were engaged by Kingdom of Heaven, which is pretty much a prerequisite for the rest of my body to get involved, actually. You probably know that Bloom plays a dude who follows in the footsteps of his father (Neeson: Kinsey, Love Actually) in traveling to the crusades in Jerusalem in like the year 1100-
Kingdom of Heaven also had me vacillating between being a geek, constantly seeing Monty Python and the Holy Grail and The Lord of the Rings — Iain Glen (Darkness, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider) appears briefly as Richard the Lionheart, and all I could think was, You can tell he’s a king, he’s not covered in shit; and in one pre-
And that’s where Kingdom of Heaven ends up falling down: it’s supposed to be one man’s story but it lingers far too much on staging enormous battles and far too little on Balian — Scott, and the script by first-
(Note to Orlando: Dude, get away from the epic battles, quick. Yes, it’s all very manly and the fangirls like me love it when you shoot an arrow or swing a sword and get all sweaty in a noble cause, but show us what else you can do. I’m thinking a Noel Coward-
Sure, the opportunity to drool is a fine excuse to go to the movies. But I would have loved it if Kingdom of Heaven had totally kicked my ass for other reasons, too.
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MPAA: rated R for strong violence and epic warfare
viewed at a semipublic screening with an audience of critics and ordinary moviegoers
official site | IMDb
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