Early on in Greg Crompton’s Eddy’s Kingdom, journalist Omar Mouallem (who is undoubtedly the most eloquent and interesting part of this tepid documentary) reveals what seems to be the thesis of the film. Mouallem suggest that notorious subject Eddy Haymour frequently ran afoul of the law due to either being unaware of the processes surrounding events, or that he simply ignored them. It’s a filter that seems kind of innocuous until you realize that this is being used to describe what is essentially an incident where Haymour kidnapped his three children he did not have custody of, and shuttled them to his homeland of Lebanon.
This is pretty much the cycle of Eddy’s Kingdom. Crompton rolls chronologically through Haymour’s life, touching upon the litany of crimes that seem mark various chapters in the subject’s life. Some are small. Others are quite large, including the assault of his ex-wife or the holding of an embassy hostage. All are danced around in some capacity. Crompton never really presses his subject, or the other various talking heads. Instead, they’re merely shrugged off. When discussing the incident with the ex-wife, for example, Haymour simply chalks it up to being “a sad time.”
This, completely undermines the sympathy that one may have for Haymour, who likely was railroaded in some capacity by the B.C. government, and was also unfairly profiled in the media due to his heritage. The inert talking head documentary stylings further contribute to the frustrations here. Both in subject matter and form, Eddy’s Kingdom is unchallenging, a film that fails to properly do its unique subject matter justice, or force us to reconcile with difficult truths in any way.
- Release Date: 5/28/2020
