SIMPLICITY DRAGS DOWN 'KINGDOM'.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

`KINGDOM OF HEAVEN'' is another in a recent line of sword-swinging epics that insists on adding ideas to bloody spectacle.

Ridley Scott's Crusades saga appears more sincere than ``Troy,'' ``King Arthur'' and ``Alexander'' about getting the philosophical issues and much of the history about its subject as right as a big-budget movie can.

But that contributes to making this well-intentioned film, in a way, more frustrating than its sillier antecedents. Quite simply, ``Kingdom'' has farther to fall once Scott and screenwriter William Monahan reduce their story to a clash between the noblest of warriors and the most hissable of bad guys.

That's not the only damage Hollywood-think does to the film. Its protagonist, Orlando Bloom's Balian, starts out as a humble French blacksmith. But after one fencing lesson and a few words about chivalric duty from the father he never knew, a Crusader knight named Godfrey (Liam Neeson, very good), Balian not only becomes a formidable fighter, he understands land management and military strategy as only someone to the manner born could. In the 12th century, anyway.

In addition, Balian works out an enlightened, egalitarian worldview that seems a good five centuries ahead of its time. When he rallys the troops for the final defense of Jerusalem with a speech that basically boils down to, ``Noble Everydudes, all these Saracens who want to kill us have as much right to this place as we do,'' you wonder why anybody with a medieval mind set wouldn't have tossed him off a parapet.

Other than that, Scott and company get a fairly good grasp on the tenor of the times. About halfway through the 200-year debacle that was the Crusades, Western European Christians controlled much of the Holy Land, but only by maintaining a respectful truce with the Kurdish General Saladin (Syrian actor Ghassan Massoud).

When Balian arrives in Jerusalem, its leper King Baldwin (Edward Norton, wearing a golden face mask) is on his last legs, and the power struggle is in full swing. Baldwin's sister Sibylla (Eva Green) and top adviser Tiberias (Jeremy Irons) pragmatically want to maintain peaceful coexistence. Sibylla's glory-hound husband Guy de Lusignan (Marton Csokas) and his greedy pal Reynald de Chatillon (Brendan Gleeson) want more holy war.

Balian soon falls in with the doves - via falling into Sibylla's bed, during a laughably truncated love scene.

Indeed, Scott has said that much key footage has been excised from his first cut of ``Kingdom of Heaven.'' It shows. Characters and relationships that are surely meant to have deeper resonance don't. And while the film does not skimp on spectacle, history buffs will be frustrated that we're shown the lead-up to and aftermath of the famous 1187 Battle of Hattin, but none of the world-changing battle itself.

The warfare we do see is at least as impressive as that in Scott's ``Gladiator,'' and certainly presented on a grander scale. The combination of vast, live-action elements and CGI extensions looks far more natural than in ``Troy,'' and the flow of fighting is coherently presented, unlike in ``Alexander.''

Yet there aren't very many of the ``wow'' action moments that made ``Braveheart'' and the last ``Lord of the Rings'' entry (or, for that matter, Scott's own ``Black Hawk Down'') so satisfying.

In fact, the only thing that's likely to get some people worked up about ``Kingdom of Heaven'' is its insistence on the villainy of some Crusaders and the almost uniform dignity of their Muslim foes. To its credit, the movie is not nearly so simplistic on that topic as those offended by it may claim. But since so much about ``Kingdom of Heaven'' got dumbed down, defending its more complex positions is going to be difficult.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

KINGDOM OF HEAVEN - Two and one half stars

(R: violence, sex)

Starring: Orlando Bloom, Eva Green, Jeremy Irons, Liam Neeson.

Director: Ridley Scott.

Running time: 2 hr. 25 min.

Playing: Wide release.

In a nutshell: Crusades epic wrestles, superficially, with some provocative ideas about faith, fanaticism and their various wartime perversions, but takes too many Hollywood plot shortcuts to add up to much more than a couple of cool, medieval battles.