BEFORE: I put this on a DVD with "Ladyhawke" a couple of years ago, but I know almost nothing about it, sort of flying blind with this one...
THE PLOT: A young knight sets out to join King Richards crusaders. Along the way, he encounters The Black Prince.
AFTER: Ugh, this was really terrible. Loosely based on the story of the Children's Crusade, but it was just so hard to understand the narrative, and so little got explained along the way. You sort of expect that a movie will at the very least explain itself, or proceed in some kind of logical progression of events, and that's just not the case here.
Robert, a young knight (Eric Stoltz) sets out to find King Richard and fight in the crusades (why?) and along the way he finds a group of Paris orphans who are being hunted by slave dealers (again, why?) and they band together to find safety by locating said King. I'm not sure this makes any sense - why would an English King care about the safety of French orphans? It's not even his country!
And the Black Prince (Gabriel Byrne) is capturing children to sell to the Muslims - why? What are the Arabs going to do with a bunch of grimy, smelly French kids?
There's one good sword battle between Robert and the Black Prince, but other than that, nothing redeeming about this movie in the slightest way. This movie made "A Knight's Tale" look like "Ben-Hur".
RATING: 1 out of 10 crossbows
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