Tag: Alexander Siddig

Kingdom of Heaven (2005)

Scott’s crusader epic is a much better, more thoughtful film than you’ve been led to believe

Director: Ridley Scott

Cast: Orlando Bloom (Balian of Ibelin), Eva Green (Sibylla of Jerusalem), Jeremy Irons (Lord Tiberias), David Thewlis (Hospitaller), Liam Neeson (Godfrey of Ibelin), Brendan Gleeson (Raynald of Chatillon), Marton Csokas (Guy de Lusignan), Edward Norton (King Baldwin IV), Ghassan Massoud (Saladin), Michael Sheen (Priest), Velibor Topić (Almaric), Alexander Siddig (Imad ad-Din al-Isfahani), Kevin McKidd (Sergeant), Jon Finch (Patriarch Heraclius), Ulrich Thomsen (Gerard de Ridefort), Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Godfrey’s nephew), Iain Glen (Richard I)

Version control: This review cover the Director’s cut of Kingdom of Heaven, a three-hour film that is much better than the original theatrical version.

For hundreds of years the Middle East has been the site of wars over land and religion: the more things change, the more they stay the same. Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven is a grand, melancholic epic about the crusades, a period of history that seems to become even more divisive and controversial if every passing year. During the First Crusade (1096-99), a European Christian army had bloodily seized control of Jerusalem (massacring its Muslim population). The Crusaders built a state that lived through fragile truces, in a constant state of cold war with the Muslim states that opposed their conquest. Scott’s film picks up the final years of that ‘kingdom of Heaven’.

He does so through fictionalised version of the events. Balian (Orlando Bloom), a former military engineer, is now a widowed blacksmith in Northern France – until Godfrey of Ibelin (Liam Neeson), a crusader lord, returns to claim him as his illegitimate son. Fleeing his home after murdering his bullying priest brother (Michael Sheen), Balian arrives in the Holy Land as the new Lord of Ibelin. But he not a paradise, but a kingdom full of ambitious lords and zealots, surrounded by the armies of Saladin (Ghassan Massoud) with the whole thing only just held together by the wise leper king Baldwin IV (Edward Norton). There is already a power struggle for who will control Baldwin’s heir, the child of his sister Sibylla (Eva Green). Will it be the moderates led by Tiberias (Jeremy Irons) or the zealot Templars led by Sibylla’s husband Guy de Lusignan (Marton Csorkas)?

I’ve always been interested in this period of history, and I’m a sucker for a grand historical epics. So I’m pretty much the target for this ambitious, luscious, flawed but engaging film. It helps when it’s assembled by a director as full of visual flair as Ridley Scott. Kingdom of Heaven is an extraordinarily beautiful film – one of those where you really could snip out every frame and hang it up on your wall. Gorgeously lensed by John Mathieson, it moves from a chilly, blue-filtered North France (a land of artistic snow fall and permafreeze) to a David Leanesque desert land, of rolling sand dunes and skies tinged with deepest blue. It’s a film of breathtaking scale, as medieval armies converge, legions of siege weapons roll up to never-ending city walls and the desert stretches as far as the eye can see.

It makes a fantastic backdrop for a film that’s tries really, really hard to take a measured, reasonable view on human nature and religion. It’s fair to say that this makes Kingdom of Heaven a very serious film (there is barely a few minutes of humour in its entire three hour runtime – a joke about Neeson once fighting three days with an arrow in his testicle is about all you’re gonna get), but it’s also nice to have a film celebrating compromise and moderation. Really, Kingdom of Heaven isn’t a true representation of the Crusader period at all – the real Balian and Baldwin would scarcely recognise the humanist liberals they become here – but as a sort of fantasia on balancing conflicting demands in a place that seems to make men mad, it’s hard not to be respect that it’s trying as hard as it is.

To achieve it’s aims, Kingdom of Heaven divides both sides of the argument into goodies and baddies. For the goodies, Baldwin and Saladin are reasonable, just men willing to strive for a world where all can worship freely. Edward Norton – unbilled under a silver mask and English accent – brings a great deal of strength and wisdom to Baldwin, matched by Ghassan Massoud’s superbly patient Saladin. On the other side, we have the “God wills it!” brigade. Admittedly on the Muslim side, they are embodied by one of Saladin’s advisors, whereas the crusaders are awash in angry, Holy War bloodlust types who believe any killing is justified if it’s in God’s name.

Kingdom of Heaven has a respect for faith, particularly when filtered through the words of characters who don’t believe painting a cross on their chest allows them to kill anyone who disagrees with them. Several times, Balian argues doing sensible, reasonable things technically against the word of the Biblewill be understood by God (if he’s worthy of the name). It playfully suggests David Thewlis’ (in an excellent performance) reasonable Hospitaler might actually be an angel, with his power to appear undetected and prodding of Balian towards doing the right thing (Thewlis even disappears into a burning bush at one point).

But, if I’m honest, much of the rest makes its points rather forcefully, showing a world where fine words are corrupted by ambition and anger. Many of those preaching faith are really motivated by a constant hunger for more –power, land, you name it. The closer a character is to the Church, the more likely they are to be either a pantomime, mustachio-twirling villain (like Marton Csorkas imperious Guy or Brendan Gleeson’s playfully-psychotic Raynald) or snivelling hypocrites like Jon Finch’s Patriach (who counsels converting to Islam and repenting later when the shit hits the fan).

Kingdom of Heaven lays out this earnest, well-meaning political viewpoint of how moderation should trump fanaticism, while filling its wonderful visuals with gorgeous costumes, stupendous sets, a brilliant score and some stunning battle sequences. But there is always a fascinating lack of hope in Kingdom of Heaven. When Balian troops up Gethsemane on his arrival in Jerusalem, he only hears the wind not the word of God. When offered the chance to save the kingdom from itself, it comes with such a morally compromised price-tag a straight-shooter like Balian is always going to say no. While his father (one of Neeson’s patented performances of weary, maverick nobility) clings to ideals, the film is perhaps best summed up by Jeremy Irons’ wonderfully world-weary performance as the cynical Tiberias: mournful, depressed and wondering what the hell it’s all been for.

It’s no wonder it’s such a savage world. Kingdom of Heaven doesn’t shirk on the medieval violence. Bodies are hacked to pieces with fountains of blood. It opens by introducing us to a regular Dirty Dozen of toughened Crusader veterans – only to slaughter nearly all of them in the first act. Death is only seconds away in this dangerous world: even sailing to the Holy Land is to risk near certain shipwreck. It’s fascinating that the film’s amazing reconstruction of the Siege of Jerusalem sees Balian fighting to make the siege so difficult that Saladin will be forced to offer terms rather than slaughter the city’s population as the First Crusaders did hundreds of years ago.

Sadly, the film’s main weakness is Orlando Bloom. Surfing the peak of his post LOTR popularity, Bloom’s limitations are ruthlessly exposed by carrying this historical epic. His delivery lacks shade and depth, he doesn’t have the charisma for the big speeches and he never convinces as either a man consumed with grief or a battle-hardened veteran (he doesn’t even remotely look like Michael Sheen’s older brother). It’s a part that needs a role of commanding presence, but Bloom doesn’t have it. It’s unlucky he also has to play off Eva Green giving a complex, well-judged performance as a Queen who learns humility the hard way (the director’s cut restores an entire plot-line for her, which adds hugely to the film’s quiet air of inevitable tragedy).

Kingdom of Heaven has a lot going for it: it looks amazing, it’s crammed with stunning scenes on a truly epic scale and gives excellent opportunities to a host of great actors. It’s an interesting, surprisingly glum exploration of the struggle to find peace. Sure, it’s view of the Crusades has very little link to do with the actual crusades and it’s a little one-sided in its views. But it’s also a thoughtful film that’s really trying to say something that’s worth hearing about moderation, all with some truly breath-taking epic film-making. It’s not a lost masterpiece, but it’s a much more impressive film than its reputation suggests.

Syriana (2005)

George Clooney gets crushed by the corruption of major oil companies in Syriana

Director: Stephen Gaghan

Cast: George Clooney (Bob Barnes), Matt Damon (Bryan Woodman), Jeffrey Wright (Bennett Holiday), Christopher Plummer (Dean Whiting), Nicky Henson (Sydney Hewitt), David Clennon (Donald Farish III), Amanda Peet (Julie Woodman), Peter Gerety (Leland Janus), Chris Cooper (Jimmy Pope), Tim Blake Nelson (Danny Dalton), William Hurt (Stan Goff), Mark Strong (Mussawi), Alexander Siddig (Prince Nasir Al-Subaai), Mazhar Munir (Wasim Ahmed Khan), Nadim Sawalha (Emir Hamed Al-Subaai), Akbar Kurtha (Prince Meshal Al-Subaai)

The more I think about Syriana the more I think Stephen Gaghan was unlucky. If he had made this story today, you can be sure this would have become a ten episode series on HBO or Netflix. Instead, Gaghan made it into a film in the early 2000s. This means the bloated, over expanded plot gets crammed into two short hours at the cost of much of the emotional and political complexity it needs. Without this Syriana is an angry lecture, something that throws some interesting observations at the viewer, but basically resorts more often to shouting at them about how shit the world is. With its interlinking storylines and “serious” content it looks like intelligent filmmaking, but it’s more like a misguided opportunity.

Gaghan’s film follows four plotlines. Bob Barnes (George Clooney) is a CIA field agent, and expert on the Middle East, coming to end of his effectiveness as a field agent, struggling to get his superiors in Washington to understand the complexities of Middle Eastern oil politics. He is ordered to arrange the assassination of the eldest son of the Emir of a Persian Oil Kingdom Prince Nasir Al-Subaai (Alexander Siddig). Nasir is suspected of the States of harbouring terrorist sympathies. In fact he is a passionate reformer, desperate to modernise his country. Nasir is working with Bryan Woodman (Matt Damon) a representative of an American energy company, whose son is tragically killed by an electrical fault at one of the Emir’s estates during a business trip. The Kingdom is also being courted by a newly merged US oil company Connex-Killen for exclusive drilling rights – with attorney Bennett Holiday (Jeffrey Wright) tasked to ensure that nothing stands in the way of the merger and the riches that will follow. As these three storylines of political and economic oil matters interweave, migrant oil worker Wasim (Mazhar Munir) struggles to find work in the kingdom, and is slowly wooed by extremists.

Gaghan directs his own script and that might be his first mistake, as he is not a confident or imaginative enough director to craft something truly dramatic and engaging out of this highly researched, technical script. Instead, the script – or rather the research behind the script – drives events at every turn and leads to scenes that feel like they should be intelligent but tend to be actors reciting reams of dialogue and stats at each other. Combined with that, the film has a slightly smug preachy tone to it, desperate to let us know how shady and corrupt the world is and how trapped we are on a continual downward spiral of greed and corruption preventing us from improving and changing the world. It doesn’t always make for compelling viewing.

On top of that the complexity of the narrative is often mistaken for smartness, but often feels rather more like rushed and sudden execution of a story that doesn’t really have time to breath. Frankly the story that Gaghan wants to tell needed 8-10 hours of screen time and he doesn’t get it. Instead he throws everything and the kitchen sink into this sprawling study of oil based corruption. From Washington, to private oil firms, to intelligence agencies, to the cash rich families sitting on top of these oil geysers everyone gets a kicking as part of the same sordid mess that has led to the world being dominated by the rich and the regular guys of the middle east being left adrift and easy picking for extremists.

It feels like it should carry real weight, but it never really does because it’s hard for us to get a handle on what is going on half the time and even less harder to care once you realise the film has sacrificed character and motivation for the drive of putting together its polemical view of the world. The film is stuffed with actors, but its striking how few of the characters they play make an impression. Every part is played by a star – except of course for the inexplicable casting of jobbing 1980s Brit TV actor Nicky Henson as an arrogant oil exec, a casting so outlandishly out of place for an actor you are more likely to see in One Foot in the Grave that I kind of love the film for it – but none of the roles is really much more than a cipher.

That’s not to say there isn’t decent work. Christopher Plummer brings great heft and menace to a law firm Washington bigwig. Jeffrey Wright nailed so well playing this sort of on-the-surface meek functionary who quietly learns (albeit reluctantly) to play the game as well as the loudmouths that he has played the same role several times afterwards. Alexander Siddig owes much of his post DS9 career to his exceptional thoughtful and sympathetic performance as an Arab Prince whose forward-thinking is a disaster for the governments who want to keep using his state as an ATM.

George Clooney won a generous Oscar (it was surely partly a compensation for not winning anything for Good Night, and Good Luck that year) but gets the meatiest role as Bob Barnes, the tired and cynical CIA agent who slowly begins to question the orders he is given and the world he has been working to build for his masters. His story contains the most actual drama, possibly why it stands out – poor George gets a rough ride here, tortured, arrested, bruised and blooded. It’s pretty straight forward stuff for an actor of his quality (Clooney plays it with a world weary outrage) but it’s also the most memorable storyline of a film straining at every moment to be important.

It’s quite telling actually that the film’s most memorable speech is put into the mouth of Tim Blake Nelson’s oil executive (“Corruption is why we win!”) a character so lightly sketched out he barely appears other than making that speech. It’s a sign of the weakness of the film: characters serve purposes to the narrative and then disappear. These lightly sketched characters act out a lecture on world politics and economic-energy-driven corruption. Syriana needed room to breath in order to become a drama rather than a lecture. Instead it’s a decent workmanlike movie with ideas that it never manages to really express in a way that will make you care. When it tells you rich businessmen love money and powerful politicians love power you’re likely to basically say “yeah. I know. Tell me something new…”

The Fifth Estate (2013)

Benedict Cumberbatch and Daniel Bruhl struggle through this turgid retelling of hacking derring-do in The Fifth Estate

Director: Bill Condon

Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch (Julian Assange), Daniel Brühl (Daniel Domscheit-Berg), Alicia Vikander (Anke Domscheit-Berg), Anthony Mackie (Sam Coulson), David Thewlis (Nick Davies), Stanley Tucci (James Boswell), Laura Linney (Sarah Shaw), Moritz Bleibtrue (Marcus), Carice van Houten (Birgitta Jónsdóttir), Peter Capaldi (Alan Rusbridger), Dan Stevens (Ian Katz), Alexander Siddig (Dr Tarek Haliseh)

In 2010 the world was thrown into turmoil when a website called Wikileaks published a host of top-secret government documents that revealed a never-ending stream of Western wrong-doing during the war on terror. The leak was co-published by WikiLeaks and the Guardian and New York Times. However Wikileaks founder Julian Assange (played here by Benedict Cumberbatch) had other ideals – namely that the files should not be redacted in any way to protect serving US officials or informants in hostile countries.

It should be a gripping story of the state failing to keep up with the speed of modern communications. But instead this is one hell of a turgid, dull info-dump of a film that turns this potentially explosive event into something about as gripping as watching a series of people type into a computer. On top of that, the film totally fails to develop any proper personality dynamics to engage your interest, and instead falls back into the usual crude filmic language of a star-struck protégé realising his mentor has feet of clay.

Bill Condon’s direction is totally incapable of making the entry of data into a computer dynamic or visual, and is completely unable to bring the world of computer hacking and data search to life. In fact, there is so much information given to the viewers (rather than drama) that the impression I was left with is that Condon doesn’t really understand what’s going on in the movie anyway. He certainly doesn’t manage to make it interesting or feel that important.

Visually, the film is flat and falls back on superimposing text on the screen when people type or creating a sort of “mind palace” office to represent the inner workings of the Wikileaks server (which is basically just a big office space). In fact, the film gets less interesting as it progresses – which is a real shame after a nifty credits sequence that chronicles in images the development of the press from cave paintings, through the Rosetta stone, printing, television and the internet.

Not to mention the lack of drama about this. Things are just happening – we never get any sense of the danger or the world-changing impact, or any reason why we should care. Poor Anthony Mackie, Laura Linney and Stanley Tucci are wheeled out as a trio of American government big wigs who talk at each other at great length about what is going on and how it will endanger government assets – but it’s all show and not tell. The plight of a Tunisian informant – played with his usual skill by Alexander Siddig – is reduced to a few scenes, a human element that gets trimmed so much it carries little impact.

The film also deals with the personality clashes Assange inspires, here interpreted as a borderline sociopathic monster, an egotist and liar interested only in his own legend. Benedict Cumberbatch gives a superbly detailed and richly observed impersonation of Assange, but the character has no depth. He’s merely a sort of phantom monster, who the film slowly reveals has no conscience. Compare it to the presentation of Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network (a film that is everything this clunking disaster is not). That film is also told from the prospective of a disillusioned former colleague, but there our view of the central character is shaded and given depth – and we are encouraged to recognise we are seeing one person’s perspective. Here the film swallows whole the side of the story presented by Daniel Berg.

Berg played with a disengaged flatness by Daniel Brühl, snoozing through a part shorn of any dynamism, whose views oscillate constantly until he finally settles for being a campaigner to keep sources safe. Alicia Vikander gets shockingly short shrift as a girlfriend – she even has the obligatory “stop working on the management of earth-shattering leaks and come to bed” scene. Berg allies himself with the traditional media, similarly portrayed with a clunking obviousness: David Thewlis is a standard shouty journalist, Peter Capaldi a chin-stroking concerned editor.

The Fifth Elementis flat and unable to dramatise the world of computer coding. The dialogue is turgid and obvious (there is a terribly obvious metaphor of Assange constantly lying about the reason for his white hair – he can’t be trusted you see!) and the performances are either dull, clichéd or saddled with this terrible writing. At the end, as Cumberbatch plays Assange denouncing the entire film in a reconstruction of a talking head interview, you get a sense of the more interesting, fourth-wall-leaning film this might have been. But sadly the rest of the film reminds you what a flat, tedious, stumbling, confused, inexplicable misfire this really is.

Vertical Limit (2000)

Chris O’Donnell and Scott Glenn head into high nonsense in Vertical Limit

Director: Martin Campbell

Cast: Chris O’Donnell (Peter Garrett), Bill Paxton (Elliot Vaughan), Robin Tunney (Anniez Garrett), Scott Glenn (Montgomery Wick), Izabella Scorupco (Monique Aubertine), Robert Taylor (Skip Taylor), Temuera Morrison (Major Rasul), Stuart Wilson (Royce Garrett), Nicholas Lea (Tom McClaren), Alexander Siddig (Kareem Nazir), David Hayman (Frank Williams), Ben Mendelsohn (Malcolm Bench), Steve Le Marquand (Cyril Bench), Roshan Seth (Colonel Amir Salim)

You know a film is in trouble when its heart-rendering death scene at the open is met with howls of laughter from the packed cinema. But Vertical Limit is that kind of film: totally ridiculous, mind-numbingly stupid and filmed in such a melodramatic, over-the-top way it’s impossible to take seriously. It’s a silly, contrived, stupid movie, but at least it’s good clean fun.

Peter (Chris O’Donnell) and Annie Garrett (Robin Tunney) are on a climbing trip with their father when an accident puts them all in danger. Their father sacrifices himself to save their lives, but afterwards the siblings drift apart. Three years later she’s part of mountaineering team taking arrogant millionaire Elliot Vaughan (Bill Paxton) up K2. When disaster strikes (of course!) and Annie, Elliot and wounded Tom McClaren (Nicholas Lea) are stranded up the mountain, Peter gets together a team to head up the mountain to save them. The best way of doing this? Why, carrying nitro-glycerine up the mountain! That’s right, this is a film where our heroes basically carry a series of bombs up a mountain: it’s The Wages of Fear meets Cliffhanger.

Oh lord where to begin? In the very first scene, I horribly misread the relationship between Annie and Peter – so it was a bit of shock, after what seemed like a fair amount of flirting, to have them revealed as brother and sister. But their weird obsession with each other hangs over the whole picture, and is used to justify the people killed in this film to save Peter’s sister. Peter certainly can’t get excited about his nominal love-interest (a bored looking Izabella Scorupco), although that might be partly due to Chris O’Donnell’s balsa-wood earnestness.

But then the whole film is wonkily acted. Bill Paxton is so obviously a wrong-un, he practically twirls his moustache through the whole film. Scott Glenn plays a mystic climber mourning the loss of his wife, like some sort of bizarre shaman. Robert Taylor is wooden as Skip. Alexander Siddig is wasted as a rent-a-Muslim (the film is so old the call to prayer even needs to be explained!). Among the smaller roles, Ben Mendelsohn plays a sort of climbing Crocodile Dundee. None of these actors bring their A-game to this rubbish.

And it is rubbish. Nothing in it is particularly exciting, despite the efforts of Campbell to throw a (literal) avalanche of events at the screen, with characters hanging over cliffs like no-one’s business. None of these action sequences is actually that exciting – some, like a prolonged helicopter drop-off, are frankly dull – and everything has a sort of inevitability about it. You can predict who will die and who won’t, and the film only talks about things that are going to happen: of course Montgomery Wick’s wife’s body will be revealed after one of several avalanches (another scene that provokes sniggers rather than gasps); of course Vaughan will try and kill his fellow survivors; of course Peter will have to come to terms with his dad ordering him to cut him loose at the start of the film.

Most of the mountain climbing effects are not convincing. The opening sequence is obviously filmed at ground level, the passes of K2 look like sound stages. At one point Wick drops the title by saying they are at the “Vertical Limit” where the body starts dying: O’Donnell responds like a forgetful child actor, suddenly remembering he’s supposed to be out of puff in this scene. The very idea of taking nitro-glycerine up the mountain like this is so completely irresponsible and stupid that the film can’t get over it. Needless to say many, many, many more people die on this rescue expedition than are actually rescued at the end. Not that it matters, as Annie and Peter reconcile to continue their odd flirtatious relationship once more!

Vertical Limit is a terrible film. No doubt about it. It’s good to laugh at, I’ll give it that. But it’s got literally nothing else going for it. Nothing. Martin Campbell: how did you deliver something this mundane and stupid?