Tag: Ulrich Thomsen

Kingdom of Heaven (2005)

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.

Centurion (2010)

Michael Fassbender surveys the devastation that is Centurion

Director: Neil Marshall

Cast: Michael Fassbender (Quintus Dias), Olga Kurylenko (Etain), Dominic West (General Titus Flavius Virilus), Liam Cunningham (Brick), David Morrissey (Bothos), JJ Feild (Thax), Noel Clarke (Macros), Riz Ahmed (Tarak), Dimitri Leonidas (Leonidas), Ulrich Thomsen (Gorlacon), Imogen Poots (Arianne), Paul Freeman (Gnaeus Julius Agricola), Rachael Stirling (Drusilla), Less Ross (Septus)

It’s an old fable: the “missing” Roman legion, the 9thLegion that allegedly marched to Scotland around 120 AD. We don’t know what happened (if anything) but it usually gets tied into Hadrian’s decision to build his famous wall. Anyway, Neil Marshall’s film tries to plug the gap, with the Legion eradicated on an ill-judged expedition north to settle affairs there once for all. A “ragtag bunch” of survivors (all of whom match expected character tropes) have to run over hostile countryside, led by surviving senior officer Centurion Quintus Dias (Michael Fassbender) to get back to safety and Roman lines.

It’s a Neil Marshall film, so you can expect blood-letting aplenty and high-octane action on a budget. And you more or less get it, mixed with his love for accelerator-hitting chases and against-the-odds action. It’s entertaining enough, but its main problem is that it feels a little too by-the-numbers, as if all the thought about how to make it original and exciting went straight into the look and style of the film – all drained out colours and serious claret – and none at all into storytelling or character.

You sort of end up caring for the characters in a functional way – largely because they are all such familiar types – but their personalities seem to have been designed entirely around the various deaths that have been invented for them. So the enthusiastic meet unjust ends, the likeable fall to cruel chance, the world-weary give their lives for one more stand, the selfish meet justice. At the end, the characters you would basically expect to stumble to the finish line do. It’s a film that lacks any uniqueness.

In fact, what gives the characters life is the professional character actors playing them, all of whom can do what they are doing here standing on their heads and look like they were largely there with an eye on pleasant after-shooting hours in a series of local pubs. It’s hard otherwise to think what attracted them to these cardboard cut-outs and pretty familiar structure.

Not that there is anything wrong with what Marshall does with his film here – it’s a lot of fun when stuff is happening, it’s just that nothing feels like it carries enough weight or originality to survive in the memory. Everything is fine but nothing is really inspired. There is very little sense of Ancient Rome or any other place. The Romans are basically squaddies, an idea that sounds interesting until you remember turning period warriors into versions of modern soldiers is hardly new, while the Brits chasing them are woad-covered psycho stereotypes.

So while it passes the time, Centurion does nothing special with it. It feels like a wasted opportunity – that with a cast this good and a decent premise, plus a nice little historical mystery to pin it onto in order to give it depth, Marshall could have come up with something that was more than the sum of its parts rather than less. Perhaps it needed more time with its ragtag group so they actually became characters rather than plot devices. Perhaps it needed to take more of a rest from its constant chasing to allow quieter moments of reflection and character. Perhaps it’s just a chase film that is never quite compelling enough to make you overlook these things. Either way, Centurion isn’t an all-conquering empire of  film.

The International (2009)


Clive Owen and Naomi Watts are lost in the high-pressure world of big finance in The International

Director: Tom Twyker

Cast: Clive Owen (Louis Salinger), Naomi Watts (Eleanor Whitman), Armin Mueller-Stahl (Wilhelm Wexler), Ulrich Thomsen (Jonas Skarssen), Brian F. O’Byrne (The Consultant), James Rebhorn (New York DA), Michel Voletti (Viktor Haas), Patrick Baladi (Martin White), Jay Villiers (Francis Ehames), Fabrice Scott (Nicolai Yeshinski), Haluk Bilginer (Ahmet Sunay), Luca Barbareschi (Umberto Calvini), Alessandro Fabrizi (Inspector Alberto Cerutti), Felix Solix (Detective Iggy Ornelas), Jack McGee (Detective Bernie Ward), Ben Whishaw (Rene Antall), Lucian Msamati (General Motomba)

Welcome to another of my unlikely pleasures. I remember seeing The International because we took a punt on it with an Orange Wednesday 2-for-1. I had no real expectations, but I was totally wrapped up in it. It has an old-school 1970s Hollywood-conspiracy-thriller feel. I keep waiting for it to be rediscovered (I’m waiting in vain it seems). But it’s a wonderful, tense little thriller which – by focusing on the shady, morally corrupt dealings of private banks – always seems relevant. Throw in alongside that a truly stand-out action set-piece at the centre of the film and you have a much overlooked pleasure.

Louis Salinger (Clive Owen) is a scruffy Interpol agent, with a reputation for getting too involved in his cases. Working with Assistant New York DA Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts), Salinger is investing possible illegal arms deals involving private investment bank IBBC. After their inside contact and Whitman’s fellow DA are both murdered in quick succession, Salinger takes the battle directly to IBBC. But the bank, chaired by ruthlessly blank businessman Jonas Skarsson (Ulrich Thomsen), is prepared to go to increasingly violent lengths to protect its interests, with assassinations arranged by its in-house security expert ex-Stasi agent Wilhelm Wexler (Armin Mueller-Stahl) and carried out by his mysterious Consultant (Brian F. O’Byrne).

Tom Twyker shoots the film in cool grays and drained out colours, giving it a very cold palette fitting for its exploration of the ruthless viciousness of big business. Twyker uses the cold, modern architecture of the various businesses the film is set in to great effect, making a wonderful, imposing backdrop. The camera constantly allows this domineering modern architecture to fill the frame, and mixes it up with some well-chosen aerial shots that reduces the action to cogs in a machine. It’s a very distinctive visual film – and it’s not until it finishes that you realise (apart from blood) you’ve really seen a red, a green or a purple in the whole film. There’s no jittery editing or hand-held camerawork – it’s got a smooth old-school cinematic quality to it.

The plot is a chilling conspiracy thriller, that (within the confines of a Hollywood action thriller) gets really in-deep into the workings of big finance. Critics accused it of being a light-weight Jason Bourne but really it’s more of a colder Parallax View. It largely eschews action in favour of paranoia, investigation and simmering tension. It’s a well-constructed journey down the rabbit hole, as Salinger gets both closer towards answers, and further away from bringing anyone to justice. 

Clive Owen’s rumpled performance is perfect. Far from being a “Bond audition”, Salinger is an outsider, a man who lives for his job, who wears his heart on his sleeve, and spends large chunks of the film either terrified or out-of-his-depth. Practically the first thing that happens to him is being knocked out by the wing-mirror of a truck. His grubby, unshaven scruffiness doesn’t recover from that. Owen gives the performance both a moral conviction and a slight air of desperation and bewilderment, as if he can’t quite understand why others aren’t as wrapped up in his case as he is.

He’s part of a great cast of actors – the film is full of unusual choices and rewarding cameos. Armin Mueller-Stahl mastered playing these world-weary ex-spies years ago, but delivers here. Broadway star Brian F O’Byrne is great, as a ruthlessly efficient hitman. Ulrich Thomsen is rather good as the blank businessman and family man, who seems to see no moral issues in the conduct of his bank’s business. Interesting actors like Patrick Baladi, James Rebhorn, Luca Barbaeschi, Haluk Bilginer and Lucian Msamati round out the cast with terrific cameos – there is always a unique actor and dynamic performance around every corner.

The plot of the film doesn’t unfold the way you expect it to – and mixes hope with a nihilistic powerlessness. Twyker’s directing is professional and he adds a lot of intelligence to a standard Hollywood set-up. He also throws in a few moments where the film pauses to reassess things we’ve seen before or to allow Salinger to puzzle out another crucial clue.

And it’s fitting for a film so in love with overwhelming power of modernist architecture that its most explosive sequence takes place in New York’s Guggenheim museum. This is a gut-wrenchingly exciting, destructive gun battle that serves as the pivot point. Brilliantly shot and edited, and perfectly built towards, it explodes into the film and grabs your attention. Owen again is perfect for this sequence – determined, but terrified and completely out of his depth – and Twyker’s use of the Guggenheim is masterful. Honestly it’s one of the best shoot-out scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie: five minutes of brilliance. You’d remember the film for that scene alone, if for nothing else.

Okay it’s not a perfect film by any stretch. Poor Naomi Watts has a thankless, ill-formed part. I’m pleased the film doesn’t include any romantic connection between the two characters at all, but (despite her work on the case) Whitman seems more a plot device than a character. The script largely fails to serve up too many memorable lines – and its main strengths are to present familiar actions and events in a fresh manner. Some have found the plot momentum to often flag – and there is something to that – and the overall schemes of the bank are not always completely clear.

But, nevertheless, I really like The International. It’s got a classic old-school feel to it. Its views on the immorality of big business feel very true, as does its presentation of the villain as basically a monolithic institution – the actual guys running the bank seem irrelevant, it’s just the ongoing nature of business. And in this world of corporations, where destroying a few men don’t admit to a hill of beans, how can truth and justice ever win out? Even if it had nothing else, tackling that idea makes The International feel like something new and worth revisiting. Well that, and that Guggenheim gun fight…

The World is Not Enough (1999)


Pierce Brosnan falls into Sophie Marceau’s clutches. Time for one last screw.

Director: Michael Apted

Cast: Pierce Brosnan (James Bond), Sophie Marceau (Elektra King), Robert Carlyle (Renard), Denise Richards (Dr Christmas Jones), Robbie Coltrane (Valentin Zukovsky), Judi Dench (M), Michael Kitchen (Bill Tanner), Colin Salmon (Charles Robinson), Desmond Llewelyn (Q), John Cleese (R), Samantha Bond (Miss Moneypenny), Ulrich Thomsen (Sasha Davidov)

I’ve long been of the belief that Pierce Brosnan’s Bonds were each a decline from the last, no matter how much money and action were thrown at the screen. TWINE in no way shakes that opinion. It’s a film I remember when I saw it in the cinema twenty years ago being a little, well, disappointed by.

After the assassination of an oil tycoon in MI6 headquarters, James Bond (Pierce Brosnan) is assigned to protect his daughter Elektra (Sophie Marceau) as she vows to complete the pipeline her father started. MI6 believes her life is endangered by her former kidnapper Renard (Robert Carlyle). Heading to Eastern Europe, Bond soon finds himself in the middle of a complex game, with a mysterious string puller, that seems to revolve around the stealing of a nuclear warhead and the kidnap of M (Judi Dench), with only nuclear scientist Dr. Christmas Jones (Denise Richards) to help.

TWINE is all about its electrifying opening sequence. It’s possibly the biggest, most exciting introduction to a Bond movie yet. Not only does it have a truly compelling action sequence in the boat chase down the Thames, but there’s plenty of plot, tension, mystery, revelation and humour – Bond straightens his tie under water – to match the entire content of some Bond capers. Brosnan is deadly in the Bilbao sequence – you believe he’s a killer – he’s working out of the money trap is Bond at his most ingenious and the beautifully filmed and edited boat chase is an absolute wonder. It’s edge of the seat stuff and when it finishes, you can just imagine a cinema full of people letting out a sigh of relief and kicking back to enjoy the rest of the film.

In fact that’s part of the problem. As Anthony Lane said in his review of the film “It’s the best 15 minutes in film this year. Let’s pack up and go home”. The problem is literally nothing in the film that follows can even hope to live up to this – and by the end, it’s practically given up trying. How does a film that started so vibrantly end with such a hackneyed fight on a submarine, with our heroes squabbling over something so fiddily it looks like an ink cartridge?

In between the phenomenal start and the damp squib ending, the film pings off to a lot locations – Azerbaijan! Turkey! Bilbao! – but everywhere still has the same bland, identikit feel to it, for all the shots of the odd famous landmark. That’s not to mention the rather laborious plot that ties the film together. It’s a film that feels like it’s trying to make a series of big statements about our hidden selves, revenge, manipulation – but falls short each time. It’s wrapped inside the most elliptical villain scheme I can remember. I only watched it a few days ago and even I’m not sure why Elektra wanted to blow up that damn submarine in Turkey.

Bond and Renard face off in the underwhelming sub sequence

Increasingly it becomes bogged down in machinations that feel recycled from previous films in the series. Shady Russians, corrupt security guards, chases down the snowy mountains, fiddily endings in old style nuclear subs. The film’s second biggest set piece – the attack on a cavier factory – has a rather formulaic inevitability about it. 

It has its moments of cool and charm, but in many ways it’s a blunt and crude film. What sort of eclectic film casting selects people as wildly diverse as Goldie and Ulrich Thomson as sidekicks? Robbie Coltrane returns as Zukovsky, but his character has been broadened from his first outing in GoldenEye into some sort of comic relief, a cane carrying buffoon a million miles from the ruthless ex-hitman in his first appearance. We even get a return of the “MI6 accidentally stumbles in on Bond doing the nasty” closing gag so beloved of the Roger Moore era. By the end of the film it really feels we’ve come a million miles from the ruthless efficiency and dynamic action it opened with.

The film’s most interesting beat, without a doubt, is Elektra King. It’s a stroke of inventiveness to turn the character established as the Bond girl, into the film’s villain.  Elektra uses many of the tropes of traditional Bond girls – vulnerability, sensuality, playfulness, a certain gutsiness – and repackages them as villainous tools, weapons of manipulation and deceit. Sophie Marceau is very good as possibly the most intriguing villain of the whole series, and the film neatly leaves open the question of how far her experiences twisted her, or whether her sociopathy was a deep lying trait. Her chemistry with Brosnan seems at times a little forced, but she gets most of the meaty content of the story and handles it with gusto. It’s especially neat to see how Marceau adjusts and adapts her performance for each person she encounters – with Reynard she’s playful and infatuated, with Bond she’s more aloofly sensual.

Denise Richards gets all nuclear physicist

She certainly fares better than poor Denise Richards, playing a character who feels like she was written backwards from the film’s closing punchline (“I thought Christmas only comes once a year” indeed). As if the producers wanted to counterbalance the innovativeness of Elektra, Richards feels like she’s wandered in from a classic Moore film: nominally an expert in something grand sounding (nuclear physics – and you can have a £1 from me if you ever meet anyone who believes Denise Richards has a PhD in rocket science) but really a damsel in distress dressed in hot pants. I’d further add that Brosnan already looks far too old for her.

The film’s best asset though is Brosnan’s Bond. The more I rewatch Brosnan’s efforts, the more I feel sorry the guy didn’t get more of the sort of material Dalton and Craig received either side of him. He clearly has the acting chops to do something a bit more interesting with the character, but his Bond is always a bit tonally confused – one moment he will stare viciously at a fallen opponent, the next he’ll be wearing a shit-eating grin and perving over ladies’ underwear in a nightclub. Brosnan does both these things, I hasten to add, extremely well: this film is probably his peak action performance, and at several points (not least his first encounter with Reynard) his sense of physical danger is jaw dropping. TWINE is a kind of perfect embodiment of his era: 1/3rd Connery to 2/3rd Moore.

For all that the big picture of the film gets away from Apted, he does have a good eye for smaller moments that stick with you – the tie moment, Brosnan’s look into the camera after his first kill. Moments like this appear throughout the film: a cut back to Zukovsky’s grin when Bond’s car is destroyed, the pinpoint bullet shot that hits a plate of glass right in front of an unblinking Reynard. Moments like this get increasingly lost as the film pushes on and becomes more and more formulaic and traditional, but they are still there.

That’s what it all comes back to: the film is not the sum of its parts. Moments stand out, but the whole thing really doesn’t. Everything feels a little too pre-packaged. Even an actor as brilliant as Robert Carlyle (the sort of actor everyone said should play a Bond villain) is lost in the mix, his performance as forgettable as a million other “ruthless anarchist” types we’ve seen before. There are some neat homages – I like the painting of Bernard Lee in MI6 HQ – but too much of it feels like more of the same, told with a professionalism that crushes the life out of individualism. So while it has moments that excite and entertain, as well as elements (such as Elektra King) that feel unique and original, too much of it also feels like, well, any other Bond film. For all its energy, it feels like watching a world-class athlete run on the spot.

FINAL COMMENT:This film does get some credit however for how tastefully it handles the final scenes of Desmond Llewelyn as Q. Tragically Llewelyn died in a car crash shortly before the film was released, but his work here is possibly some of the best he contributed to the series. Never let them see you bleed and always have an escape route.