Back in the 1990s, if you were a boy in high school, there was pretty much nothing better than Arnold Schwarzenegger. Terminator 2: Judgment Day, a film made in a lab with the most up-to-date scientific methods to appeal to teenage boys in the 90s, made him the biggest star in the world in 1991, and even if T2 remains his professional high water mark, it effectively made him an icon. But even as Arnold embraced his massive celebrity, there remained a passion project that never quite came together. This was Crusade, a massive action epic set in the Middle Ages set to be directed by Paul Verhoeven. The script was written, actors were approached, but in the end it fell apart. Intended to be Arnold’s follow up to Last Action Hero, that film’s underperformance (and other massive internal problems) caused Carolco Studios to get squeamish about the $100 million price tag for this ultra-violent, nihilistic religious critique. They figured that money would be better spent on Cutthroat Island, one of the biggest disasters in movie history, so the studio went out of business!
But for the Arnold nerds, Crusade took on a bit of a mythic quality. You would hear tidbits about it in the dorky publication of your choice (it seemed to come up regularly in Premiere Magazine), but whatever you did hear sound absolutely tantalizing. Paul Verhoeven began to become an obviously interesting director to follow, once you were old enough to catch Robocop. Additionally, those of us converted into the Church of Arnold by T2 were discovering the grisly appeal of his back catalogue, real ass-kickers like Predator, Commando and the original Terminator. Crusade promised to be the perfect marriage between sleazy 80s Arnold and slick 90s Arnold. It was easy to imagine what kind of ferocious masterpiece this should have been, and for years now, I’ve always wanted to hear more about it.
I don’t know when the script found its way online, but it did. You can read it, right now. This has been a script I wanted to see for over twenty years, so I was thrilled to find it. I’ll be breaking it down in detail below, with spoilers and all that, so if this has any of the holy grail status for you that it did for me, you might want to check it out yourself. The short version is that it’s pretty good. Otherwise, you can hear about it below.
This script is dated January of 1993, and is credited to Walon Green, the author of The Wild Bunch, the landmark Sam Peckinpah western known for its intense, realistic violence and rejection of romanticism. I mention that because Crusade has both in abundance. One nice thing about reading this script is it’s very visual, and when you add in factors like Arnold, Verhoeven, Wild Bunch, and $100 million dollar budget, the general tone and tenor comes through loud and clear. This is a blasphemous Paul Verhoeven version of a late 90s studio period epic, in the Braveheart/Gladiator vein, but starring Arnold in pure Conan the Barbarian mode. The script is a perfect version of this, in a sense, delivering more or less exactly what that promises, warts and all.
The script opens in France, 1095. The title card appears over a religious procession walking through a miasma of incense smoke and candle flame that ‘suggest(s) the devastated landscape of a holocaust’ (Crusade is not a subtle script). We meet our Arnold protagonist, Hagen, who is breaking into an Abbey to steal gold! This character appears to be designed explicitly to play to Arnold’s strengths. Indeed, I found it quite easy to simply think of him as medieval Conan, and this Abbey intro draws immediate comparison to that film’s tower infiltration heist. The first thing that becomes clear is that this script is gruesome AF, with body parts and viscera popping up on most pages. One of Hagen’s first acts is dumping a guard into a vat of horse entrails, which qualifies as one of the kinder fates anyone in Crusade finds. But it’s not just the violence that’s excessive. As Hagen enters, the Abbot is engaged in an alter boy orgy.
Hagen is summarily captured, as despite his possession of low animal cunning, he’s kind of a big dope, and the Abbot summons the local lord, Count Emmich of Bascarat. This script has plenty of villains, but Count Emmich is the big one. His introduction is intense stuff: naked, skin dyed red with wine, he chases a fifteen year old girl across his vineyards before raping her in a grape vat, drowning her in slurry while his coterie of knights hoot and cheer. Emmich says ‘I declare this vintage well seasoned!’ Once again, Crusade goes so hard you aren’t sure it’s serious. But it is. Hagen, it turns out, is Emmich’s half brother, the bastard son of the local lord, and as such Emmich wants him dead. This is the central relationship of Crusade, a variation on Ben-Hur and Messala, and I have to admit, it never really gels into anything beyond pretty basic heroes and villains stuff. This is old school Arnold material, and within that context, Emmich’s OK. Hagen is sentenced to death, set to hang, and would do so, if the Pope didn’t make his surprise arrival at the Abbey, moving back the execution. He’s here to recruit the armies of Christendom to fight in God’s holy quest to liberate the Holy Land, AKA the Crusades, which everyone seems to think is a great idea.
Hagen is imprisoned with Aron Ben Zvi, or Ari, a con artist traveling with the Pope’s retinue, and the character who will serve as Arnold’s sidekick throughout the script. Ari is an evergreen source of exposition, explaining anything Hagen or the audience needs to know, and what few jokes there are in Crusade usually come from him. The character he reminded me of the most was Beni, the side villain from the Brendan Fraser Mummy film, although Ari remains a good guy all the way through. While awaiting execution, Ari introduces the idea of religious miracles (and their fraudulence) to Hagen, which inspires his latest escape attempt: searing a cross onto his back and claiming prophetic dreams about the Dome of the Rock (having been coached by Ari). This scheme fools enough of the Pope’s congregation, and Hagen is knighted and sent off to fight in the Crusades, as a symbol of God’s forgiveness, with retinue of followers who believe him to be the Lord’s chosen man.
The rest of Crusade is a violent adventure through Europe towards Jerusalem. I could run down he series of events, but there’s a bit of a repetitive quality to a lot of it. Hagen keeps attempting to escape the Crusades, but through circumstance or his inability to let innocent people suffer, is constantly dragged into worse situations that draw him in deeper. When he saves a Jewish wedding party from Emmich, they finally have their big duel, and Hagen crushes Emmich’s jaw, so Emmich sells Hagen and his entourage into slavery. This leads to a huge set piece battling corsairs on the high seas, which in turn leads to another huge set piece where a bunch of minor characters get graphically castrated. Hagen is purchased by Ari, who has the ability and wherewithal to pose as whatever religious affiliation suits the moment, and brought to the palace of Emir Ibn Khaldun, the script’s representation of good Muslims.
A word now about how religion is treated in Crusade. Coming as it does from a vulgar raconteur like Paul Verhoeven, you might have expectations about the level of satire or commentary offered here. I think it goes without saying that the Crusades themselves are treated a case of mass hysteria and fundamentalist lunacy, a charnel house of corpses and suffering divorced completely from God’s supposed grace. Religious figures are presented as outright villains in some cases, but even the more noble ones are blinkered old men, blinded by propaganda and largely ignorant of the horror show that’s been unleashed, or at least, ignorant until it becomes too late. The majority of the characters here, however, are power-mad psychopaths who see the Holy Land as a vault to be plundered, and that goes for characters of every religion. That said, Verhoeven’s view of religion is hardly cut and dry. He’s actually authored a book on the historical Christ in the intervening years, and even a piece of pop art like Robocop is full of allusions to faith and the way systems compromise Christ’s doctrine. As a script, I would say Crusade does not fully engage with these topics - we’re making an Arnold film here, after all - but my expectation is this would be Verhoeven’s chief interest, and even an unchanged script would offer Verhoeven some opportunity to create indelible religious contradictions in the images. The ending of the script very much tries to have its cake and eat it too, when it comes to God, but the long and the short is that in Crusade, the Crusades are presented as a bad thing, and it’s not a whole lot more complicated than that. I was personally hoping for a little bit more in this regard.
Ibn Khaldun is a real historic figure, although it seems like that has minimal bearing on his role here. In this, he’s essentially the sultan in Aladdin, busily trying to marry off his hot-tempered daughter, the princess Laila, who is just not feeling any of the brutish suitors brought before her. Hagen enters his service, and just as quickly attempts to escape, arousing Laila’s interest in him. This opens the script’s convoluted second half, which features Laila heavily as a romantic foil to Hagen. Given Arnold’s lack of facility with romance, these scenes are not belabored, and the attraction Laila has for Hagen seems based more off of practical concerns, such as ‘Hagen does not seem inclined to rape me’. Their courtship is one that exists within Crusade’s gruesome world, involving twists like Laila sending a concubine to pleasure Hagen in his slave quarters, which he takes her up on, hoping it will please Laila. Meanwhile, one of her erstwhile suitors has sent a lieutenant to steal her. This is Djarvat, another antagonist for Hagen to scrap with for a bit.
Djarvat steal Laila, Hagen is sewn into the carcass of a donkey and left to be devoured by hyenas. This scene is absolutely one of Crusade’s highlights, feeling like a cross between the bear scene in Midsommer and the rhino scene in Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls. Arnold’s face popping out of a dead donkey’s asshole, you get the idea. He escapes and rescues Laila, and rips off Djarvat’s beard and accompanying faceskin, allowing for Arnold’s one scripted bon mot (It looked better on you!). Hagen and Laila consummate their love, and get one good night’s sleep before Emmich’s men show up and attempt to rape her again (this time in a pile of maggot-filled manure). Laila is perpetually a damsel in distress here, that distress being very heavily slanted towards rape, and there is virtually nothing else to the character. It is not a good female role by any definition, and functionally the only one in this script (the single other one would be that concubine, who is gutted shortly after sleeping with Hagen). Crusade is not a film aimed at women, not remotely, which is probably OK, given that it’s a hyper-violent medieval epic/star vehicle for Arnie.
The third act is all plot lines and characters converging on the siege of Jerusalem, and while the preceding 100 pages have been bloody and gruesome to the extreme, it all ticks up a bit here. Hagen has a long action sequence cutting down attackers with a scythe, every devout old man dies a sad death they don’t understand, and anyone who looked cross-eyed at Arnold at some point goes down hard. We’ve got catapults launching piles heads over the parapets, lots of stuff like that. In the end, Hagen finds himself at the Dome of the Rock, helping the monk Theodosius carry the true cross away from Jerusalem and into hiding, which fulfills the dream prophecy from the beginning, even though we know it was a total con. So, God works in mysterious ways, and the legend of Hagen proves true. This all feels a touch surface level, but I’ll admit, even in script form, the image of Hagen carrying the true cross out of a burning church is pretty cool. He gets his final showdown with Emmich (a bit of an anti-climax, to be honest) and disappears into the countryside with Laila, having finally found peace in the Holy Land.
So, how much did we miss out on here? Kind of a lot, I think. One quality this script has in abundance is that it reads like watching a movie. You can see it in your mind’s eye clearly, and the talent assembled to make it happen was spot on. The obvious comparison is the Crusades movie we did get instead, Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven, and while that film has some aspects that are overall much more thoughtful (the Eva Green character is far better than Crusade’s counterpart), it does feel a bit like a modest success, and there’s nothing about Crusade that could be described as modest. That said, there’s enough crossover to suppose that if this film existed, Kingdom of Heaven probably wouldn’t. Tonally, however, Crusade is closer to the more brutal studio epics, your Bravehearts and Gladiators. One thing that Crusade has over them all is the utter lack of pretension. At no point is this script aiming at a Best Picture nomination. It knows what it is, peak Arnold, and cares less about exposing the hypocrisy of the Crusades than it does kicking all of the ass.
The announced cast for this, sussed out over vague press releases and suppositions, is pretty jaw-dropping as well. Aside from Arnold, forever locked in as Hagen (he was signed for this and everything, and in fact got a pretty hefty check for the pay-or-play contract), it’s a pretty wild bunch, pun not intended. As this was all pre-internet, it’s hard to guess how far along these negotiations got, but some solid names have emerged. The strangest of them is Gary Sinise, reportedly tapped to play Emmich. Sinise is a fine actor, who was playing villains quite a bit in the 90s, but nothing about him remotely suggests he’d be believable as a French knight. Similarly, Jennifer Connolly was the intended Laila, she’d have been in her early twenties. The idea of her in a Verhoeven-directed Arnold sex scene seems like maybe something the world can afford missing out on. Robert Duvall was apparently up for the role of Adhemar, a Catholic bishop who is easily duped and dies a pathetic death. It’s a role beneath Duvall, for sure. However, the slam dunk casting is John Turturro as Ari, a role he would have nailed. Those scenes have a perfect vibe for both he and Arnold. I couldn’t find anything corroborating this online, but my memory strongly urges me that Robert Englund, of all people, had a role in this at one point, playing some kind of priest. I recall him talking about how excited he was, and that he was looking forward to working with Turturro, but I can’t find anything explaining this recollection, and I don’t know what role he’d have played. Additionally, it’s probably safe to assume that Basil Poledouris, frequent Verhoeven collaborator and the musician behind the greatest movie soundtrack of all time (Conan the Barbarian) would probably have written the music for Crusade, and that is unquestionably a piece of greatness lost forever.
However, there is one small qualifier I’d like to make. Crusade is fairly easy to reduce to other movies that we do have, in that way some films can be accurately detailed as ‘it’s like X crossed with X’. There’s a lot of stuff I mentioned above that I was reminded of, particularly Conan the Barbarian and Kingdom of Heaven, but there is one film that exists that provides maybe our best glimpse of what Crusade could have been. That would be Paul Verhoeven’s english language debut, 1985’s Flesh and Blood. It’s a medieval bacchanal starring Rutger Hauer (who would have been a fantastic Emmich, BTW) and Jennifer Jason Leigh, and much like Crusade, it dwells on the more disgusting aspects of the Middle Ages, like the plague, the viscera, the near constant rape. And despite having a lot of aspects I’d usually cherish, I cannot deny that Flesh and Blood is not a fun watch, and not in any way the classic that you’d want from an R-rated Verhoeven historical epic. I imagine it might have been a poor proof of concept for Carolco as well, as it’s not the kind of movie that hits the mainstream. Which is not to say Crusade wouldn’t have improved on it, but more to say, well, you never know. Regardless, Crusade is also notable in that there was a time and place for it, and that was the 90s. No one is asking for a modern day mounting of this story, it was written for Arnold in his prime and that is where it must stay. But I am thrilled to have finally found it, and equally thrilled that the script Walon Green is cinematic enough to indicate exactly what it would have been, in the mind’s eye. In some sense, reading this script offered some form of low stakes closure.