Rating: R
Starring: Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, Chris Cooper, Jason Bateman, Ashraf Barhom
Directed by: Peter Berg

• Official Site

Soon after the opening credits of the film, The Kingdom, the audience is given a brief history lesson on U.S. and Saudi political relations, with a strong emphasis on oil.

This is not your typical Die Hard or Rambo action movie, where there is a clear-cut good guy vs. bad guy confrontation waiting to happen, ultimately concluding with the hero saving the day without repercussions.

Instead, what we do get is the violent and complex political landscape of Riyadh, where Eastern and Western ideologies clash, depicting a kind of brutal honesty that tends to be missing with many of the less thought provoking films of today. If you like your action sequences integrated with an element of rational political discourse, then Peter Berg has directed the perfect film for you.

A few minutes into the movie, we witness a deadly attack on Americans working in Saudi Arabia. Shrewd FBI Special Agent Ronald Fleury (Foxx) is given the assignment to go hunt down and capture the mastermind behind the deadly attack inside the Western housing compound. Fleury assembles an elite team of agents (Jennifer Garner as Janet Mayes, Jason Bateman as Adam Leavitt, and Oscar® winner Chris Cooper as Grant Sykes), who have only five days to infiltrate and disable a resistance cell calling for jihad against the West.

Upon arriving in Riyadh, Fleury and his team meet up with Colonel Faris Al Ghazi (wonderfully performed by Ashraf Barhom), a Saudi police captain seemingly torn between the politics of his nation, and his sympathetic reaction against the violence directed towards the Americans who were killed at the compound.

What takes place after this apprehensive alliance is a collection of clues that eventually leads Faris, Fleury and the rest of his team to the front door of the individual responsible for orchestrating the deadly attack, resulting in more weapons being fired than an NRA birthday bash for Charlton Heston.

The Kingdom provides the standard adrenaline rush that one would come to expect in a movie so compacted with images of carnage and revenge (the R rating is for intense sequences of graphic violence). The film’s biggest flaw is that its running time was probably a bit too short (110 minutes) for such a broad political topic regarding the control of oil in the Middle East, and how it effects that region and the rest of the world.

More time should have been given from the perspective of the Jihadists, which would have more accurately depicted the complicated nuances facing relations between the East and the West as it pertains to Saudi Arabia’s most valuable economic resource.

Overall, The Kingdom presents both splendid performances and breath-taking action that leaves the viewer gasping for air by movie’s end. In addition, the film reveals an identical response by two of its performers, just before the ending credits, that will resonate with the viewer well after the popcorn and Raisinettes have been digested.

---

Comments

Add New Search RSS

restore history   |2008-04-28 12:50:53 hello nice site! Reply 0   0

Write comment
Name:
Email:	do not notifynotify
Title:
	Please input the anti-spam code that you can read in the image.

3.25 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."