THE KINGDOM

Reviewed by Sam Hatch

Peter Berg's The Kingdom is a bit of an anomaly. It's a big budget blood and octane thriller that could have easily been made as a Jerry Bruckheimer production. It's also a richly shot and often highly detailed thesis on the cyclical nature of revenge. Director Berg (whom I knew better as an actor in the great film The Last Seduction) is ill at ease with certain audience reactions that are verging on nationalist bloodlust, but he has to realize that he did create a violent, heart-pumping drama about American Feds out to kill villainous Saudis. Oh, and to solve a crime.

The Kingdom begins with a heavily stylized mini-documentary during the credits sequence, as it informs the audience of the tangled web of US-Saudi relations and how a thirst for oil and money has created a pair of very strange bedfellows. This is followed by a visceral suicide bombing and random shooting attack upon the American civilian contractors stationed at a Riyadh compound. The script (by Matthew Michael Carnahan with reported help from Michael Mann – more on him later) makes its point by staging the bombing assault at a family baseball game – the most holy of holies for Americans.

Adding insult to injury is a subsequent bombing which takes out a personal mentor to numerous FBI hotshots. Jamie Foxx's Ronald Fleury is the Alpha Hotshot, and is the first person to get the news. He immediately wishes to dispatch a team of experts to forbidden Saudi soil for a joint effort in solving the crime (and killing brown-skinned bad men). The obvious resistance mirrors numerous real-life terrorist attacks (such as the 2003 bombings), and the fact that The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia hasn't been very interested in American help, nor even in the notion of prisoner extradition.

Foxx's character is forced into orchestrating a strong-arm scenario utilizing Frances Fisher's newspaper contact. Yet as he and his team dodge obstacles dropped by rival agencies and finally make landfall in the Saudi desert, the audience is required to make a smallish leap of faith. Any unlikely scenarios in the script are balanced by the overload of text information on screen, as the name and bio of every sideline character is emblazoned across the frame for our edification. It adds a certain Bourne-like documentary-edged realism to the story.

Fleury's team is made up of the seething, grieving Janet Mayes (Jennifer Garner, who has to go so that she can shock everyone with her outrageously offensive breasts – and to make the audience hoot and holler when she stabs a guy in his twig n' berries), Grant Sykes (Chris Cooper getting a paycheck), and electronics whiz Adam Leavitt (Jason Bateman, who plays the guy with an unceasing level of whininess).

Needless to say, they are not welcomed with open arms, but are kept locked away in a school gymnasium for as much time as possible while the real investigation gets under way. These opening moments are like an episode of CSI where nothing happens (though I think Foxx may have played with his sunglasses for at least one moment of Horatio Caine heroism). They meet the gracious Prince Thamer (Raad Rawi) who has reluctantly allowed them to visit, but he only wishes for them to enjoy a safari invite and play with his pet raptor before going home earlier than planned.

To make matters worse, the person handling the investigation is a bad, corrupt man whose brutality turns off the feds' official escort – Ashraf Barhom's Colonel Al-Ghazi. This sympathetic babysitter surreptitiously supports the notion that they solve the crime and personally escort the perpetrator into the afterlife, since part of the terrorist ruse involved evil men posing as Al-Ghazi's Riyadh-based police force. He soon comes around to Fleury's American way of thinking, and looks the other way as unsanctioned tactics are undertaken.

Around here is where the script suddenly goes conventional, and apparently there was some concern over Peter Berg suggesting that the buddy element shared by Fleury and Al-Ghazi be amplified. Some of this pays off, but other moments (such as them bonding over their love of 'The Incredible Hulk' and 'The Six Million Dollar Man') feel a bit forced and Hollywoodized. Other comedy elements come from Bateman's nervous wiseass complaints, about half of which hit their mark. Jeremy Piven scores better as an anxious liaison, who grows increasingly stressed the longer the headstrong team stays on Saudi sand.

The film reminded me a lot of the Ridley Scott feature Black Rain, in which Michael Douglas plays a ballsy American cop stuck in Japan while he bucks their system (and his de facto partner) in order to capture a violent criminal. The Kingdom shares many similar moments of Foxx and Al-Ghazi learning from one another, but there is an overlying sensibility that Saudis can't really solve hard crimes without a headstrong American to lead the charge.

Or more accurately, they can solve the crime, but (most) are unwilling to do so due to overly restrictive social conventions. (Garner again shatters these by touching the holy Muslim corpses found at the blast site.) There are other times when the film is more interested in pointing out the similarities of our two cultures, in a semi-successful attempt at creating a less biased portrait. Saudi youths are seen enthralled by violent shoot 'em up video games, though there is a sense that the point is meant that our kids do it 'for fun' while theirs do it 'for training'.

Children are a strong focus, for part of Fleury's determination is derived from the dreaded duty of having to communicate to fatherless offspring how and why their dads have died. Fleury's passive assertions that fallen American papas were the 'good guys' is mirrored by scenes showing Islamic children being taught by their elders that they must grow up to delight in murdering their heretical Western enemies.

Not to say that there aren't 'good' Saudis present in the film. Al-Ghazi and his men are blessed by Fleury's friendship as brothers in arms. It's all the other Wahhabi Islamics populating the Kingdom who are evil. The film's Osama Bin Laden stand-in is the elusive Abu Hamza, who we as an audience just know will be unrealistically dispatched or captured by film's end.

The Kingdom's prime moment is a highway-based convoy assault that leads to a major cheek-clenching firefight in what Al-Ghazi understates as a 'bad neighborhood'. This involves a kidnapping and subsequent rescue attempt while our guys are pinned down by automatic weapon fire and turbaned baddies perched high atop nearby buildings with rocket launchers in hand. The hyper-realistic hand held camerawork (and fantastic sound design) during this segment exposes one of the other weird elements of this film.

Namely that it looks feels and sounds like a Michael Mann movie. The script isn't quite up to par with most Mann features, but he is a producer and it's almost as if he secretly ghost-directed it while his 'Richard Bachman' alias of Berg sat around raiding the minibar of a distant hotel room. The numerous nighttime digital shots of the city look like 'Riyadh Vice', and fit right in with Mann's stylish visual patterns. Some of the camerawork was a bit too jerky and tightly framed during the street war scenes, so perhaps it was just Berg doing his best Mann impersonation. But boy, that guy must be a big fan.

Hey, some people still swear Steven Spielberg secretly wrested the director's chair from Tobe Hooper on the set of Poltergeist, so anything's possible. Perhaps Mann couldn't resist playing around with digital cameras in the United Arab Emirates, but didn't want to be saddled with expectations that it be a 'Michael Mann Film'. Even composer Danny Elfman gives a performance that would sound perfectly at home backing up the visuals of Mann opuses Heat and Collateral. If not for several appearances of his affinity for odd percussion instruments, I wouldn't have known the ambient score was written by Elfman at all.

Some of the tense scenes inside the speeding black trucks of VIP caravans brought to mind a very interesting National Geographic piece on Iraqi contractors who lead convoys through enemy territory. They lead an amazing life, and like the life-risking people behind the reality shows The Deadliest Catch and Ice Road Truckers can net a year's salary in a fraction of that time. Perhaps Michael Mann should make a full-length movie about those guys some day.

The Kingdom does a lot of things right, which makes it slightly frustrating when it plays some rather conventional moves, and plays certain things safe. The script should have been more aggressive when it comes to the dangers the FBI team face, and there are moments when it becomes simply silly that three Yankees can take down an army of violent locals who know the area like the back of their hands. There was also a cheesy reveal of one enemy character, and the introduction of his identity was unnecessarily protracted through a gimmicky plot device, just so the audience could go "Aha, that's him!"

In a bit of a non-Hollywood downer, the film reveals its thesis that such bloodlust will never end, with Americans and Arabs killing each other like Bloods and Crips interminably. Unfortunately, there's a foul taste left by the implied notion that we are the innocent ones, and our bloodthirstiness is justified by others' actions. The Arabs' motives (apart from the good ones, i.e. those who tolerate American values) are seen as crazy and evil. The film aims for balance (one young man is sworn to revenge following the murder of his father), but I'm not convinced that it hits the mark.

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