Coeur de lion

It's the end of the 12th century. The young pious Robert Narra (Eric Stoltz) sets out to join The Third Crusade with King Richard the Lionheart. On route, he runs away from a battle. He encounters two escaped performers/thieves Michael (Dexter Fletcher) and his sister Mathilda (Deborah Moore). Michael would like to go to Paris. They seek shelter at a monastery where they're told about The Black Prince (Gabriel Byrne) who captures and sells children to the Muslims. The Black Prince is a disillusioned former crusader. In Paris, they are captured by the orphans of the Underground City. The Black Prince kills the mayor of the Underground City and plans to capture the army of orphans as they go off to join the crusade.

The Children's Crusade is not a happy story. The problem is that the goal is not well conceived. In order for this to work for a modern audience, they need to find a nicer place for them to strive for. I don't know why anybody would root for the kids to get to the crusade. Also this doesn't feel real enough to be gritty or fanciful enough to be magical. It operates in a weird middle ground where neither is satisfied. Jerry Goldsmith brings an epic score to this not-so epic movie.

Muffle the Background music? You're kidding right? The music to this film is enough reason to try to hunt down the movie or soundtrack. This was the last film scored by Jerry Goldsmith for director Franklin J. Scaffner. They lowered the music in and out which was wrong because the film needs the music. It's not as bad as everyone says it is. Sure it drags but it's nice to see an original idea about the Crusades where Richard I is not the center of the movie. It has flaws but it's still entertaining. It's overdue for DVD since most movies from the 80s are released with no special features anyway (widescreen please). I'd rather watch this than the recent garbage like Kingdom of Heaven.

Lionheart - The Children's Crusade was an interesting find in a bargain bin at a video shop - a medieval epic that I'd never even heard of from the director of Patton, produced by Coppola and with music by Jerry Goldsmith. Looking it up on the IMDb, not many others have either: it only seems to have played a week in Detroit! Why? Well, the obvious reason is it's not very good.

Its got a solid script about a disgraced young French knight who finds himself leading a bunch of abandoned children to the Holy Land to join King Richard's crusade and coming up against Gabriel Byrne's disillusioned crusader turned child-slave-trader. But it often looks like chunks are missing, and the kids are pretty awful: Eric Stoltz very effeminate and uncharismatic as the lead, Dexter Fletcher irritating as the lovable Artful Dodger type and Nicola Cowper a one-woman petrified forest as the love interest - I've never, ever seen an actress stay as rigidly immobile or as impervious to emotion as this gal. It's like watching a beautifully made up corpse in early rigor mortis for 105 minutes. Only Deborah Moore seems to give it a bit of wellie as a tomboyish female whose far more manly than the hero.

Bits of it do work, and Byrne's dark knight character is genuinely interesting and gets all the best dialogue, but the main interest is Jerry Goldsmith's astonishingly good score, one of the best I've ever heard for an epic even if it disappears towards the end. Worth a look but set expectations on low.

This movie is perfect in almost every way, but one thing ruins it. First the good stuff: we have action, romance, evil, great locations and sets, a great Jerry Goldsmith score, and an original plot: what happens to children in war?

So how come the movie doesn't work? It's the pace. Everything in this movie happens at AN INCREDIBLY SLOW PACE. You'll get impatient and frustrated. And that ruins the wonderful feel everything else has built up.

What a shame. What a real shame.

I'm sure this movie was meant to be more exciting, but at less than 2 hours, it still drags. Perhaps it's because of the mediocre acting, or the low budget, or all the American accents, or the perpetual gray background. Okay, I understand that these were terrible times, but can't there be a little bit of brightness? You can watch evildoers get taken out by bits of rock, and just hope someone muffles the background music once in a while - trust me, it gets really distracting. And who wants to see hordes of starving and dying children? Overall, a tremendous disappointment.