Random Movie: The Kingdom (2007)

If there was ever a movie at odds with itself, The Kingdom is it.

Released in 2007, Peter Berg’s film about an attack on Americans living in Saudi Arabia likes to attempt straddling the line between political thriller and mindless action film. The story written by Matthew Michael Carnahan seems to try delving deeper into the social and political ramifications of Americans killed abroad and the subsequent FBI investigative team sent but is constantly undercut by half-handed dialogue and shoot-’em-up scenes to keep it from becoming “boring.”

Most jarring is the third act of the film which changes from a milquetoast Tom Clancy novel into a milquetoast Tom Clancy novel-based film in which the main team, led by the quite charismatic Jamie Foxx, is pulled into a rugged Saudi neighborhood with machine guns and RPGs apparently just laying around. After an hour and a half of diplomacy and some sense of restraint, the film pivots into a full out action, go ‘Murica type of film.

Other than Foxx, who gets a rather cliched bonding arc with the Saudi’s lead investigator Al Ghazi, most of the other cast members have little to do. The film progresses in such a way that there is never any real sense of character to start with (all but Foxx I believe are introduced by name via on-screen text) but the pace is nice and brisk since it so hastily switches between boring diplomacy and sort-of action sequences but again, this weakens the film that doesn’t really know what genre it wants to fall into.

Of course, while the film is largely apolitical other than the denouncement of terrorism outright, the ending must involve two characters on separate sides of the fight repeating the same mantra of “We’ll Kill Them All.” It’s hokey mostly because we know it’s coming as the film wears its subtext on the front of its T-shirt.

But of course, all of those complaints don’t render the film a complete failure. The cast is great, if underutilized (poor Jason Bateman), the direction is competent if borderline shaky-cam, and the story is engaging even if it doesn’t really know what it wants to accomplish. At the very least, the freeway scene of Suburbans being blown up gives us a new twist on the Clear and Present Danger version.