Kingdom of Heaven: The Director's Cut

Review By: Michael Dance
Michael Dance@TheCinemaSource.com

If the new edition of Kingdom of Heaven is nothing else, it is impressive. Spanning four discs, it includes a new cut of the film (now about three hours) and two discs worth of special features, with coverage spanning from before pre-production to after the theatrical release.

Strange for a movie that was virtually ignored when it came out. Last summer, Kingdom of Heaven kicked off the summer -- and the box office slump -- by debuting with a tad less than twenty million on its way to less than fifty. But hey, this is a Ridley Scott picture, and if the director of Gladiator wants to release a mega-DVD, I guess he gets to. Or maybe it's just in star Orlando Bloom's contract that all of his movies get 4-disc special edition DVD releases.

But before all that -- what of the movie? What of this behemoth of a Crusades epic, with its reported production cost of 130 million? When a film flops, as this one undoubtedly did, it's hard to weed through all the negativity and just get word of the film itself. Is it any good?

In a word: yes. Is it worth seeing? In a word, yes. But this review is not one word long, and that recommendation comes with a certain reluctance.

The story, in a nutshell, is fairly simple. Blacksmith Balian (Bloom), mourning the loss of his wife, is leading a life of depression somewhere in the rural hills of France. With some prodding from his long-lost father (Liam Neeson), he becomes a Knight, heads over to the then-Christian-held Jerusalem. He makes friends with the king, falls in love with his sister, and political intrigue ensues until he is forced to rally the troops and battle with the Muslims, led by Saladin, for control of the city. Pure epic.

First, the good parts. Luckily, there are plenty of them. When you get a director like Scott working with a budget this big, the film better look good, and with that, it wholeheartedly delivers. It's just plain beautiful. A desolate hillside with a lone cross erected; a ship on the sea shrouded in mists; a fiercely hot desert; a brilliant recreation of the city of Jerusalem -- the script hits all the right exotic locales, and the visuals deliver.

Many of the characters are also drawn sharply and thoughtfully. Liam Neeson makes a brief, strong impression as Balian's father Godfrey, and David Thewlis as the monk Hospitaler is equally strong as a friend of both of them. Still, the early sections of the film tend to get bogged down in a meandering running length (Balian seems to endure a violent shipwreck just because the filmmakers decided it would be cool to include one), and it isn't until he actually reaches Jerusalem that the film begins to ...