my rating: 
Kingdom of Heaven is a movie that invites you to believe in miracles. You pretty much have to, to accept any of what it shows you.
It's about this blacksmith (Orlando Bloom) living in the not-even-a-speck-on-the-map of Nowheresburgh, somewhere between England and Jerusalem, who is compelled by the suicide of his wife (a mortal sin, you know), the appearance of his father (a veteran of the Crusades), and a mortal sin of his own, to go to the Holy Land and become a Good Knight. He picks up swordsmanship as if he were studying with Qui-Gon Jinn (played in both this movie and Star Wars by Liam Neeson) and military strategy as if he'd fought at Helm's Deep in a previous life (as an elf, of course), and manages to learn irrigation and the seduction of noblewomen with equal ease.
Equally difficult to buy is the enlightened nobility of the then-current Christian King of Jerusalem and his Muslim Saracen counterpart Saladin (whose name is prounced more correctly here as "Salah al-Din"). The king just wants a Jerusalem where Muslim and Jew and Christian can live together in peace, like some modern-day Secretary General of the United Nations, and Salah has just the kind of respect for his enemies and for the fate of innocent women and children (and even men) that your garden variety modern-day extremist Muslim terrorist does not. Gosh, it almost makes one pine for the good old days of the Crusades, doesn't it?
Of course with such nobility on both sides, you also need some bad guys, and the Knights Templar and some of Salah's lieutenants served that purpose, demonstrating the psychotic religious fervor of those who either believe that "God wills it" or use that as their rallying cry to get the aid of those stupid enough to fall for it. It's clear that the producers were going for a kind of sociopolitical statement about all the "holy" conflicts in the Middle East, but it was undercut by just how forced it was.
Then there's this "good knight" character Balian. He's just oh so fucking noble, to the point that he refuses to accept the hand of the dying king's hottie sister and become king, because it will require someone killing the war-hungry toad she's currently married to, and so the toad (or frog, rather; he's French) becomes king and to no one's surprise picks a war with the greatest military leader the Arabs have ever seen. That was just stupid, not noble. And this same "perfect" man didn't hesitate to have sex with the future queen when she was still married to the aforementioned toad, and has no qualms about conducting a defense of Jerusalem that involves pouring flaming oil on advancing soldiers and otherwise hacking them to bits. Sure, it's defensive, but it's still barbaric brutality. And at least by God's standards, fucking whatshername was adultery. Call that consistency... because I don't.
It all ends up being quite pointless. Sin is called virtue, defeat is called victory... and not just by the characters, but by moviemakers. At least they got one over-arching point right, which is shown by the opening and closing scenes: this chapter of the Crusades - like the whole saga - was itself quite pointless.
