The Kingdom (2007)

The Kingdom begins with a history lesson, a visual timeline which starts in 1933, and takes us through to the present. It takes up only a couple of minutes at the beginning of the movie and merely scratches the surface of the history of Saudi-US relations, but Peter Berg is still to be commended for providing some context for the premise of this film. It’s no Syriana, but in some ways that’s a good thing. Syriana was brilliant, and complex, an absolute must-see, but a wee bit confusing. The Kingdom manages to both entertain and educate, slipping information about radical Islam and Saudi princes in between car chases and gunfights.

I’ve had a mad crush on Berg since he appeared as Dr. Billy Cronk, the smart, sexy, passionate doctor on the series “Chicago Hope” in the mid-90s. He went on to direct the film Friday Night Lights, which has since become a television series (he also directed the pilot), and has just wrapped Hancock, starring Will Smith, Jason Bateman, and Charlize Theron, which will be out this summer. He’s always struck me as a smart actor and director, willing to delve below the surface of his subject matter, and The Kingdom, for the most part, doesn’t disappoint in this regard. It does suffer from some clunky exposition for the benefit of the audience. “How many princes are there in Saudi Arabia? And do they each have a palace?” don’t seem like questions these agents would have to ask, for example. It’s also hard to believe that forensics expert Janet Mayes (Jennifer Garner) would be unaware of the fact that it is against Islamic law for her to touch a dead Muslim.

In spite of all that, The Kingdom manages to deliver a fast-paced, suspenseful action movie with snippets of some pretty well-written dialog, and some sharp acting. Jason Bateman provides comic relief as Leavitt, the wisecracking, Pixies t-shirt wearing (he’s an FBI agent AND a hipster!) who arrives in Saudi Arabia with a passport marked with three Israeli stamps (“My grandma lives there, is that okay?” he tells the uneasy Saudi guard). Chris Cooper (who coincidentally also appears in Syriana as well as Jarhead) steals all of his scenes as FBI Bomb Tech Grant Sykes, a slow-talking, quick-witted Southerner, and Saudi Colonel Faris Al Ghazi, who ends up helping the FBI team in their investigation, is brilliantly played by Ashraf Barhom. Leading the team is Jamie Foxx as Ronald Fleury, a fiercely determined agent out to discover the perpetrator of a bomb attack on an American compound in Riyadh which has killed not only a hundred or so Americans, but one of their own, an agent on the scene. This is what fuels the whole team’s determination and provides the emotional hook for the story, but this is not a revenge movie in any sense, and this is also what saves it. In spite of the forced nature of some of the scenes, Berg’s message here is ultimately that the Saudis and we have much in common – love of family, pride in our culture, and a sometimes manic resolve to preserve and protect what is ours, no matter the sacrifice.