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(beware: some of the following may be a plot-spoiler) The Kingdom makes an effort to enthrone itself as a tightly compact, quasi-political statement on the storied and troubled US-led Western involvement in Middle Eastern affairs. The premise is the ascendency of the Saudi Kingdom, the gravitation of the US and the West toward their petroleum resources, and, subsequently, their political position that leans toward a teetering favoritism to the West and a US military presence there. The obvious backdrop is the fomentation of hardcore Islamic loyalists intent upon ridding the Arabian Kingdom of the infidel Westerners by any violent means necessary. That much we may have already been made aware of by any number of media outlets, documentaries or prime-time news digest specials. The Kingdom, however, doesn’t presume that we know this and lays out a fitful timeline during the opening credits of events critical to the development of the current Western and Middle Eastern tensions in Saudi Arabia (and even goes so far as to hint that Bin Laden’s adversarial existence stems from the Saudi rejection of his offering of troops to fend off the impending Iraqi invasion in the first Gulf War). On what could be any “typical” day in Riyadh, Islamic terrorists shower a softball game at an American compound with gunfire and a devastating bomb attack, killing hundreds. Despite being the Saudi Kingdom’s largest terror attack on its own soil, the limp will power to fully and openly allow the FBI in to investigate is patently squared upon the American resolve to obfuscate and pander to sketchy, Washingtonian personal agendas. The Saudis, on the other hand, appear at least be willing to allow a team in to investigate, insofar as the infiltrating and underhanded insurgents can be quelled. So with some Foxxy finagling of the Saudi ambassador in America, special agent Fleury (Jamie Foxx) rustles up permission to land a scant team (Jason Bateman, Jennifer Garner and Chris Cooper) to the Arabian peninsula. While there, investigative conditions are hampered as they seek to conduct a thorough crime-scene investigation to find out who was behind the attacks. Arabian Colonel Al Ghazi (Ashraf Barhom) is assigned to “babysit” the team as a convenient and ever-present thwart. The interplay between Fleury and Al Ghazi is fluent with tension and suspicion but almost awkwardly defers to the formation of a bond and friendship between the two, almost as if turned on like a switch. The wonder of not fully knowing if Al Ghazi was a help to Fleury or not was the film’s most brazen relational accomplishment. I would have preferred a tenuous friendship to emerge in and with that suspicion instead. So it would be that the remainder of the movie would be a bomb-crater of borrowed contrivances and conveniences more worthy of a potent made-for-TV installment. For one, there are much broader contingencies to the development of the current Middle Eastern tensions than what we were treated to in the opening sequence. Second of all, the way Fleury finds out about the bombing is through a call he receives while in his son’s classroom in an unnecessary super-daddy moment. This scene was lewdly reminiscent Houston would have had something to do that befit her at least. Jennifer Garner seemed like a carnival sideshow, with a vulnerable voluptuousness that apparently was powerful enough to make the whole Saudi Kingdom shudder in cultural abasement. So teasing, fleeting and perfunctory were the allusions to the Islamic treatment of women in Garner’s role- and so rousingly out of place her innocence was to her supposed forensic expertise– that her appearance as a free-throw shooting, Laker-afficionado who pulls out bomb fragments from mangled bodies is a reminder of the script-shallowness for this character. Bomb expert Sykes (Cooper)–in perhaps the film’s most awkward moment– cops a feel of Fleury’s chest en route to Saudi Arabia and comments on his heart rate and attending anxiety. He just wanted to “check” his status, i.e., to see if he was in his right mind. Well, you’re on this big military plane at least 35,000 feet over the ocean heading at over 400 mph toward one of the biggest sources of militant Islamic insurgency in the world. Who needs some doting, grandpa-guy knowledgeable in bombs to inform you of your intrepidation? This moment tried to play up the generational difference in an affable way between them, but it ended up flat and strange. Then there’s the third team member– Adam Leavitt (Bateman)– who’s inserted into the film’s next shameless flashback to real-world terror events. His kidnap sequence is so blatantly rife with images recalling Daniel Pearl’s beheading as to be revoltingly inane. He is the movie’s lone source of mildly ascerbic, comedic satire, but none so meaninglessly chiding as to leave the audience bereft of the reason for such a cheap borrowing of images. Jeremy Piven comes up as a frenetic, glad-handing State Department representative, but only in the displaced spirit of Ari Golden in Entourage. Director Peter Berg runs amok with shaky-camera syndrome, the kind you know is supposed to infuse the feeling of being there in the action but instead becomes the source of your wife’s mild nausea (whom you drug into the theater against her will). I wanted to bask more in the panoramic studies of the Arabian land and city-scapes than I was allowed. True-to-form, producer Michael Mann offered many musical interludes woven into the fabric of the story as longing and pining interpretations to the next phase of the film, replete with textural guitars and sonorous synthesized voices. But the bloody succinctness with which the film wraps robs it of its desired ethereal destination. In fact, its life-lesson is as sweetly attained and licked as the lollipop that Garner’s character produces in the film’s most maternally-concocted moment. The Kingdom’s shining performance singly belongs to Ashraf Barhom (of Paradise Now) as the honorable Saudi cop charged with overseeing the FBI team. While Kingdom doesn’t glorify itself totally in the bloodbathifications of the Rambo’s (et al), it too cogently offers the audience an “out” in exorcising it’s vengeful leanings toward nailing a terror enemy we can see and pinpoint. Regardless of whether that’s just cheap fare or not, The Kingdom, never manages to pull itself out of the mucky pit, flailing like Major Payne’s bloody, knub-legged subject in his bedtime story.
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[...] A cool person wrote an interesting post todayHere’s a quick excerpt:Jeremy Piven comes up as a frenetic, glad-handing State Department representative, but only in the displaced spirit of Ari Golden in Entourage. Director Peter Berg runs amok with shaky-camera syndrome, the kind you know is supposed to … [...]
[...] Read the rest of this great post here [...]
[...] Read the rest of this great post here [...]