Kingdom Of Heaven

Director: Ridley Scott
Starring: Orlando Bloom, Eva Green, Liam Neeson, Ghassan Massoud
Time: 145mins

Try as he might - and he does try - Bloom is still Legolas. Fortunately, Ridley Scott's tale of King Saladin's historic siege on Jerusalem overcomes this, with Scott wisely shifting the focus to events rather than a main character as he did in Gladiator.

Bloom plays Balian, a blacksmith who soon discovers he's the son of Godfrey, Lord of Ibelin. Balian follows his father Godfrey (Liam Neeson, playing master jedi Qui-Gon Jinn all over again) to Jerusalem where he hopes to find salvation for his deceased wife and child, the former condemned to hell because she committed suicide. Newly knighted, Balian quickly finds himself caught in all manner of camel doo: hatred from resident bastard Guy de Lusignan (Marton Csokas), lust from his wife Sibylla (Eva Green) and respect from the king himself (an uncredited and unrecognizable Edward Norton).

After a failed truce and a battle led by Guy turns into a massacre, Balian finds himself leading a small vassal of soldiers, defending the holy city against King Saladin (a scene-stealing Ghassan Massoud) and oh, just about 200,000 Muslim crusaders.

Scott's comfort with epics is evident and the scale of it all - the sprawling towns, hordes advancing across the desert - comes through in every frame. But Kingdom seems like a patchwork of things we've seen. The fight in the forest and Balian's first time in the city echoes Scott's own Gladiator, and the scene when Saladin's forces assault Jerusalem is a daylight version of Saruman's orcs laying siege to Helm's Deep.

Kingdom's theme is one of tolerance. And though its sentiments are post 9/11 (Saladin and Balian both deride the use of God's name to sanction slaughter), its imagery is pure Gulf War. The nighttime sequence where Saladin's catapults launch flaming projectiles at Jerusalem triggers memories of those ghostly images broadcast by CNN of Scud missiles and tracer fire as Baghdad was bombarded back in Gulf War I.

Scott keeps the pace relentless and almost claustrophobic so you hardly feel the 2 1/2 hour running time. But Kingdom's resolution is too sudden, too abrupt, feeling more like a white-flagged surrender rather than the stalemate of two unwavering causes.

Kingdom of Heaven is a spectacle, no doubt. But it falls far short of the legend Scott surely intended it to be.