Marking Time

I was dubious about Kingdom of Heaven from the start but then I read some reviews that suggested it might have more going for it than I imagined - some insights into the Christian/Muslim conflict, for example, or failing that, an entertaining storyline. I should have stuck with my initial instincts.

This film is a mess. It’s film-making by numbers. The plot is on auto-pilot with no sense of craft and no idea of pace or character development. The characters are barely sketched - the writer assumes the audience will fill in the blanks and I suppose it’s not difficult for us since we’ve seen it all before. The dialogue is mostly exposition and - as seems to be increasingly the case with these Hollywood epics - the script owes less to the historical events it purports to portray and more to the myth of the American dream of the self-made man, the primacy of the individual, and self-help book philosophy: You can be whatever you want to be if you believe in it strong enough. And the good guy always gets the girl in the end.

I found the whole thing very tedious and at over two-and-a-half hours, just too long. The two young lads in front of me were sleeping like babies after half an hour despite being tanked-up on super-sized cokes and popcorn. The most entertaining part of the movie for me was the inquisitive child behind me who kept pestering his mother with questions: “Why is the king wearing a mask?” “Because he is a leper. Keep quiet. People are trying to watch the film.” “How is the king a leopard?”

I give it 1 star for the performances of Jeremy Irons, Brendan Gleeson and Dave Thewlis who managed to make something out of their roles with very little help from the script. As usual Treasa disagrees with me but she’s in good company.