The Kingdom: Movie Review (2007)

(Originally published 2007)

Directed by Peter Berg, written by Matthew Michael Carnahan, 110 minutes, rated R.

The new Peter Berg movie, "The Kingdom," is at its best in its opening moments. We're in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and there, on a ball field, several American oil workers and their families have gathered to play ball within the confines of their compound.

Everything appears to be going well--you can almost smell the hot dogs, the good cheer, the apple pie--until the playing field becomes a battlefield, with the Americans being gunned down by a terrorist cell apparently tapped by Allah to do their dirty work.

Suicide bombers detonate themselves. Chaos erupts. Limbs and other assorted body parts hurl themselves at the screen.

It's an ugly, violent opening that recalls the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, but since this is a big-budget Hollywood movie released on the cusp of awards season, you sense the rest of the movie could go one of two ways.

Either America is going to open one big can of whup ass and defeat this cell (otherwise knows as the commercial way), or the movie is going to dig into the trenches and intelligently grapple with what occurred, why it occurred, and seek out those responsible and bring them to justice (otherwise known as the award-winning way).

Initially, it appears as if the movie is going to shoot for the latter, but unfortunately, since shooting for box office gold is this film's real priority, it goes for the former, with the FBI, which lost two agents to the attack, taking the case.

Not that they're exactly given the green light to do so. In this movie, FBI Special Agent Ronald Fleury (Jamie Foxx) goes against the government's wishes and leads three colleagues--Jennifer Garner as a forensics specialist, Chris Cooper as a bomb expert and Jason Bateman as the intelligence guru--in a covert trip overseas.

There, they are met with the sort of opposition meant to stymie them, but which they eventually work around thanks to the Saudi colonel (Ashraf Barhom) assigned to watch and protect them. Initially, he does so with gruff assertiveness. But then, as he comes to question his country because, you know, these Americans who know nothing about Saudi Arabia (they don't even know the language) have gleaned within 48 hours the sort of critical insights he himself hasn't been able to do in a lifetime, he starts to listen to them and help.

If that carries with it a whiff of condescension, well, "The Kingdom" is filled with it. It also is filled with its share of impressive action sequences, which are the film's best selling points. At least it does them right.

But as the film reveals itself to be increasingly, disappointingly manipulative and obvious, you see it for what it is--purely opportunistic, trading off our war in the Middle East and the fears surrounding it while offering audiences a pro and con look at the Arab community that grates with its black-and-white simplicity. There is no shading here, no gray tones, just a movie designed by those and for those who get their information from headlines and soundbites, nothing more substantial.

If this film underscores anything, it's just how deeply we still misunderstand the Middle East and how our culture--in this case, pop culture--completely misses complexities it can't even begin to understand.

Grade: D+

Technorati tags:

movie reviewsmovie-reviewsmoviesfilmfilm reviewsdramaaction