While Peter Berg's "The Kingdom" does not pretend to be a foreign policy brief, its pairing of re-creation of actual recent events with Hollywood-style action is rather unsettling. After all, the idea of setting an action-thriller against terrorist activity that's way too close to real-life events is simply opportunistic. And this movie is all about the thrills.
FBI Special Agent Ronald Fleury (played by Hollywood's new favorite, Jamie Foxx, at his coolest) leads his team into Saudi Arabia to find the culprits behind a suicide bombing at a softball field in an American compound. The attack killed more than 100 oil-company employees and family members enjoying a family outing, as well as one of Fleury's FBI colleagues. Killing in the name of Islam, the fascists scream "All glory to Allah" as they machine gun and then blow up this group of Americans and their Saudi guards.
Even though nobody in Washington wants to anger the Saudis, Fleury eventually pressures a Saudi official to allow him to lead a small team into the country on a secret mission. The Saudi ambassador gives them only five days to investigate. They are told they are not permitted to work at night, not allowed to touch anything at the crime scene, and not allowed to speak to any of the suspects.
With the help of an explosives expert (Chris Cooper in full force), an intelligence analyst (Jason Bateman, who does well in this role), and a forensics whiz (Jennifer Garner), Fleury goes in big -- John Wayne big.
Cooper's Agent Sykes drawls jokes and wades in muck with soldiers who cannot understand his profanity (good thing).
Garner's weepy medical examiner, Janet Mayes, copes with laws that say no infidel can touch a dead Muslim.
Bateman's Agent Leavitt cracks jokes and reads his "Idiot's Guide to the Koran."
And Fleury alternately charms, threatens and tricks assorted officials to try and solve the puzzle and find the bomber and those who plotted this assault.
The biggest mystery in the film concerns the dispatching of a female agent to an Arab land. When the Saudi prince in charge of security turns up to inspect the scene of the atrocity, the U.S. diplomat takes one look at Mayes' breasts beneath her olive-green T-shirt and says, "We need to cover these situations."
More improbable still, Mayes is a forensic specialist, whose task is to examine corpses, so one has to ask: if the F.B.I. is so smart, why did they send her to a place where, according to this movie, she is forbidden to touch the Muslim bodies?
In the last 20 minutes, the movie comes alive. With the help of one Saudi policeman, Fleury and part of his team are able to battle dozens and dozens of well-armed men. Garner, whose weepy character had been complaining about the noise of bullets hurting her ears, suddenly becomes a fighter. While the action is well choreographed, it is completely unbelievable: the film's firefight ending plays out like a revenge fantasy. If you get seasick, you might want to pull out your Dramamine for the fast pans, the spastic editing and the chunks of information-overload narrative.
This movie faces a difficult hurdle: Go easy on the intricacies of the material and risk wrath of intellectuals, or get cerebral and lose your audience. A remarkable performance by Ashraf Barhom, whose sorrowful face as the Saudi police chief Al-Ghazi is a human map of the complex issues at stake, makes this movie a thinking person's action flick.
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