This Day in Theaters: Sept. 28, 2007

The Kingdom (2007)

 

Let me take you back to a time when America was at war with Middle-Eastern terrorist. It was a simpler time back then before we were preoccupied with Angry Birds and when the Cavaliers were the favorites to win an NBA title. I am talking about 2007; the year we were presented with Peter Berg's The Kingdom. Like yesterdays it is fair to ask while this film is worth noting but like yesterday it was tough finding films to profile released on September 28. Unlike yesterday, however, this isn't the feel good movie they play on TBS twice a month. This is a film about FBI agents (Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman) teaming up Saudi Police (Ashraf Barhom, Ali Suliman) to investigate a terrorist bombing of an American workers' compound. But it turns out that bombing was a small part of a bigger plan. With action, suspense, and intrigue and it i in my opinion Berg's best effort to date. But what do the critics say?

Peter Howell of the Toronto Star:

"At a time when Hollywood insists that Americans feel guilty about their Middle Eastern misadventures – as seen in such angsty agitations as In the Valley of Elah and the upcoming Grace is Gone – this noisy endeavour harkens to the days when all the Yanks needed to straighten out scruffy foreigners was an arsenal of automatic weapons, aviator sunglasses and four-letter words.

...

Director Peter Berg and writer Matthew Michael Carnahan obviously possess some kind of social conscience, because the movie takes pains to point out that the title kingdom, Saudi Arabia, has both heroes and knaves within its walls. Just as America does."

"Why did you tattoo your head if you never shave it?"

A contrast from the Minneapolis Star Tribune's Colin Covert:

"The film becomes a hallucinogenic swirl of jaggedly edited jump cuts and gut-clenching carnage that ends with a lot of people dead, but nothing really changed. The coda throws into question the noble intentions that supposedly guided the FBI team, creating a queasy moral equivalency between their actions and the terrorists'.

I left the theater completely uncertain about what the filmmakers intended to say about the orgiastic bloodshed they showed me. "The Kingdom" is an explosion of rage in search of a rationale."

 I do agree with Covert when it comes to editing. For some reason Hollywood thinks its cool to film movies without a tripod and cut quickly between shots and scenes to give a film more realism but it can end up being more of a distraction than an upgrade. If you get past the jarring camerawork you do get a pretty decent flick. The actors all seem to play their parts well, even though we've seen the same stock characters before, and they created some good chemistry too. The movie has enough twist and turns to keep you guessing which I enjoyed. The action was fierce and the whole film had an intensity that fit it quite well. Even though we've seen it all before, the Americans come to country X to investigate incident Y and end up helping foreign organization Z get their man, this movie still provided some great entertainment.

Can you spot the Americans?

Many critics seem to have taken issue with the way the movie portrayed the Saudi characters as well as its attempts to convey some sort of message. The first issue is just many of these critics trying to play it PC and pretend they are above thinking of the Middle East as some terrorist filled region; unfortunately it is and there is no use pretending it is not. However, I do think The Kingdom should've shunned any sort of political or moral message and treated itself as a straight up action and suspense film. That way they wouldn't have had to waste time trying to get us to leave the theater with a different point of view. We all know plenty of good citizens and families live in Riyadh and that terrorism is bad so don't force it down our throats; just give us what we want and not a sociology lesson. But for its faults I still say it is worth a watch so check it out if you get the chance.

IMDb Score: 7.0
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 51%