The Kingdom

Typically speaking, when movies have their release dates constantly pushed back, it means the movie is an absolute dud. That is what happened with The Kingdom. Originally slated for April of this year, they pushed it back to July, then August and finally September. The trailer had been out for what seemed like a year and although it started as something I wanted to see a lot the pushing back each time made it less and less appealing. Yet, I braved the bad omen based on the mostly positive reviews I had seen and went to see it anyway.


A bomb goes off in an American community inside in Saudi Arabia and in it the blast was a good friend of Ronald Fleury(Jamie Foxx). Fleury works for the F.B.I and wants desperately to get over there and investigate the thing for real. Of course, the Saudi royalty cannot allow such things to happen as it would make them look weak. However using his powers of persuasion(blackmail) Fleury is allowed to take 3 others with him to go over and inspect what is going on. His team- Computer specialist Adam Leavitt(one line cracking Jason Bateman), Medical specialist Janet Mayes(Jennifer Garner) and bomb expert Grant Sykes(Chris Cooper). When they arrive in Saudi they are met with resistance from the cop,Faris Al Ghazi(Ashraf Barhom) assigned to them as a "baby-sitter". Fluery can tell that the cop does not like restricting their work as he also wants to find this killer, so Fluery uses his powers of persuasion again and finally they are able to really search for clues into the madness.


"The Kingdom" is a reference to the Saudi royalty and all of their oil and while it is not technically a war movie it has war movie tendencies, as in a lot of heavy handed preaching about good and evil. But, one thing I liked about the movie is the symmetry of the good and the evil, brought to a stark revelation in the closing moments of the movie. In the end this movie can be broken up into 3 distinct parts. The first section is the back story and the resistance. The second section focuses on the clue searching and puzzle solving and the third section is a bomb ass climatic action sequence. Each section has a very specific moment when they end, making it an nice fluid transition for the audience. The war movie tendencies also include the kinds of camera work. Often times they resort to the hand held shaky camera where it seems like the cameraman was falling all over the place in order to catch the chaos of fighting, or war in general.


To me the heart of this movie belongs in the forged friendship between Fluery and Ghazi. Each man is a strong willed, smart and determined man and watching them start as nearly adversaries and end as friends was a nice thing to watch. I am sure part of the reason so much focus was put on that relationship was to show us that everyone is really equal and that good people are good people no matter what they look like. Foxx does very well with the cool Alpha male type of character and Barhom really makes Ghazi a wonderful character. He shows his humanity but at the same time she shows the darker side we all have- revenge oriented violence. Jennifer Garner does fine with what she given but she is really window dressing to show the differences between American women and Saudi women. Jason Bateman has the best lines, although at times they feel out of place, as does he. However, he does have a nice moment towards the end that shows he can do more than be smarmy. Chris Cooper seems tailor made for roles like this. He comes off as a seasoned war veteran, a man who is not afraid of getting dirty.


The overall feel of this movie is good. As the man next to me said as he was coming out "That was a good ass movie." Granted I believe most of that came from the doozy of an action sequence that takes up the final half hour. It is an all out gun fight chalk full of cars getting blowed up and a lot of loud bullet sounds. It is tense but huge, intimate but massive and it is a hell of a lot of fun. That is not to say that is without fault because one thing that bothered me during the movie was the director's constant need to point out how we should be feeling at each moment. Instead of trusting his audience or trusting his actors/writers and even himself, he felt the need to give us an extreme amount of images to evoke the specific emotion he felt we needed to have. It gets old after awhile and the slow motion towards the end kind of got out of hand but it didn't take away from the good time I had while watching the movie, so it wasn't all bad.


I want to end by talking about some of the negative reviews of this film that are out there. So many of them talk about how violent it is and how macho it all is and that the entire movie is one big action sequence. I am not sure these people even saw this movie because other than the big bomb at the beginning and the climax there is no other action in the movie. It is a thriller of espionage and strategy. It is like your typical cop drama as they spent a majority of the movie looking for the truth and only at the end do they really give us a gun fight.