Dir. Peter Berg, US, 2007, 110 mins
Cast: Jamie Foxx, Chris Cooper, Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman
Review by Matthew Rodgers
From the stunning opening credit sequence that condenses the Saudi/American relationship into two visually arresting minutes, you are fully aware that Peter Berg’s fictional movie is going to be an intelligent, raw and difficult experience; add to these adjectives the spring-wound tension and spectacular action sequences and The Kingdom becomes a front-runner for anybody’s top ten of the year list.
When a western housing facility is bombed in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, leaving hundreds of men, women, and children dead, the F.B.I send in an investigative team to work against the clock without lighting the political blue-touch paper both home and abroad in order to establish who is behind the horrifically depicted attack. Special Agent Ronald Fleury (Foxx) is the family man handed the task of assembling the elite team (Cooper, Garner, Bateman) under the strict guidance of Saudi Colonel Al Ghazi (Ashraf Barhoum) to infiltrate this volatile concrete jungle.
Hitting the audience like a stray mortar attack The Kingdom's look is viscerally effective and under the guidance of producer Michael Mann it’s no coincidence that the film resembles his starched steadicam of Miami Vice translated to the dusty vistas of Saudi Arabia. The frantic nature of the foursomes plight is enhanced in the same way that each of Ali’s blows were landed in Mann’s 2001 biopic by keeping the camera tight to the action, suffocating the visuals and adding to the intensity. The final 20 minutes are the most three dimensional 2-D action scenes committed to film as you find yourself ducking the missiles and peering around the corners.
That’s not to say that The Kingdom is all style over content because Berg bravely attempts to paint the conflict from all sides. Sometimes coming across as slightly jingoistic from a US stand-point and reducing the issues to base “good” versus “evil”, especially in the cloying, misjudged final scenes but it still remains an intriguing insight into a world few of us would ever want to see, but would be ignorant to ignore.
Jamie Foxx excels as Fleury, a man simmering with anger below the surface level cool, he surveys the situation as an agent first and a human being second before his character arc dictates change to come full circle; his scene with a dead comrades son contains very few words but unexpected emotion, this isn’t the machoistic stoicism of Black Hawk Down. Both Garner – c’mon she was a fully fledged “spy who could cry” in the superb ALIAS – and Cooper are as good as their inclusion suggests and it’s only Bateman (the comedy gold of 'Arrested Development') who suffers by being the one asked to deliver comedy lines at sometimes the most inappropriate moments. However, the star performer is Barhoum as the Saudi Colonel torn between whom to believe, his bond with Fleury supersedes the conflict, their different backgrounds, the destruction that surrounds them and unifies the two as humans on a level playing field, as friends. It does what only Hollywood can do by finding hope in a hopeless situation.
Bruising, brutal, breathless and brilliant are some of the justifiable descriptive words being thrown at The Kingdom poster. I concur.
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