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It's good. Excellent and somewhat topical representation on western/middle-eastern relations back in the day, good script, Scott's usual fantastic framing - shot for shot, this is one of the prettiest epics I've ever seen. Doesn't have the melodramatic emotional wallop of Gladiator, largely because the pacing is off and because it's a little too intelligent to make that work - Gladiator was a big dumb shout-a-thon, beautifully put together, but a basically manipulative piece of Hollywood filmmaking, making epic spectacle out of common tragic-hero tropes in a similar way to Braveheart, El Cid, Ben Hur... Kingdom Of Heaven expects a little more from its audience, and so doesn't have that same kind of gut emotional payoff you get when you turn off your brain and just bask...
Everyone is fantastic in this, by the way - Neeson is the dad you always wanted (if you were a twelfth century blacksmith), Ed Norton is a lyrical and tragic masked Kng Baldwin, and Jeremy Irons growls like a bastard as the King's right hand, Tiberius. Supporting cast are uniformly wonderful... Michael Sheen is just amazingly, sneeringly scummy as the panto-bad guy in charge of the templars. And Bloom? He rocks, kind of. Physically imposing (Legolas got buff!), broodingly charismatic, glowering and mono-syllabic... all perfect, until he opens his mouth. As soon as he speaks, all you hear is some sixth-former declaiming bad poetry. But this is a minor quibble - he gets so few lines, and the rest of the film is so good, that you can forgive that.
It's not perfect, by any means - it's overlong, poorly paced, and a bit unfocused towards the beginning. But I really enjoyed it. |
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