Kingdom of Heaven-a review

“Kingdom of Heaven” promises to be a real barn burner. And in some ways, it is. In an early scene, a barn is literally burnt down (when the protagonist, a blacksmith whose wife’s corpse has been desecrated by a priest, finally runs the aforementioned priest through with a red hot poker, and then in the scuffle, accidentally sets fire to his workshop---in my opinion, the best scene in the film). After this highlight, however, the film goes downhill, with weak character development, less-than-perfect plot, and predictable cheesy inspirational speeches. To be fair, however, there were only three things seriously wrong with this film.

(1) Poor casting: Orlando Bloom is yet again hopelessly miscast as a blacksmith, and the limited spectrum of personalities that he can depict does not give him the tools he needs to make the most of this role. This is apparent in the numerous “inspirational” speeches Bloom gave, which reminded me of numerous other films that he has been in lately.

(2) Weak and inconsistent character development: The scene where the priest is stabbed with the poker starts to give us a picture of a genuinely angry, tortured antihero, but then the main character just becomes the bland Orlando Bloom staple role with that obnoxious accent. Also, the protagonist was a static character, except for the fact that he totally forgets about his dead wife, and impulsively carries on an affair with the attractive, married, and arbitrarily selected princess of Jerusalem (and then refuses to marry her and thereby become King of Jerusalem . . . Is there any logic to this?). It could have substantially improved the movie to have shownthe protagonist's development from naivete to psychological maturity at the film's conclusion, or at least in some ways shown him to have been changed by the vast quantity of new experiences he had been exposed to. Unfortunately, this was not done. Nor should the protagonist have been depicted as such an unrealistic goody-goody. His “goodness” lacks verisimilitude, especially when we see in his actions a definitely callous and thoughtless disrespect for his dead wife.
Another issue here is that they killed off some of the most interesting secondary characters, and left it to weak actors/roles (of which there was an unnecessary profusion) to hold up the plot, or lack thereof.

(3) The soundtrack: There were a lot of really strong themes introduced at various points in the movie, but none were ever really developed, nor did they interplay, segue etc. to create a cohesive whole. This is really too bad, as it is this which just might have saved this film from total ruin.

On the positive side, however, this film did have excellent battle scenes, backdrops and costuming. The cinematography was also generally quite good (none of the through the helmet point-of-view shots that we saw in the epic disaster, Troy), although I found that there were far too many close-up shots of Bloom for my liking.

**/*****

Film reviewed by Dancing Turkey Productions