dir: Peter Berg
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No, not the Danish tv series by Lars Von Triers set in a monstrous hospital, no, not the US remake with a script by shitemeister Stephen King, which was marketed as Stephen King’s The Kingdom, which compounds the unnecessariness. This The Kingdom is an attempt to be current, to show Americans what America is dealing with overseas, to make themselves feel powerful in the pants about their efforts spreading freedom and democracy in other countries, and to act as a sterling appraisal of just what the origin of the problems are that the US faces against the Dar al-Islam, or the Islamic world.
Suffice to say that if that’s an accurate summation of where the flick tries to go, it fails miserably in its intentions and in its execution.
Execution is probably a tactless word to use in this instance. The plot of the thing is as follows: an American-hating, freedom-loathing group of Islamic terrorists in Saudi Arabia orchestrates a horrific terrorist attack upon the American expat residents of an enclave compound where they all thought they’d be safe from the predations of the outside world. Many hundreds of Americans die, and the House of Saud makes solicitous sounds to the Americans working in the oil industry, but doesn’t show any willingness to pursue the perpetrators.
The actual attacks, which escalate in ferocity and lethalness, are shocking. What’s most shocking is that this is the only part of the film which is handled well. The rest, well, the rest is history.
For some reason known only to crazy people on nasty drugs, a team of FBI agents led by Ronald Fleury (Jamie Foxx), who lost one of their own in the carnage, wangle and wheedle their way into Saudi Arabia in order to pursue some kind of investigation into the event. Embarrassed, the authorities alternately hinder them and help them in order to maintain relations between the two mighty nations.
The villains aren’t the State Department, the House of Saud, the police, the army or their hairdressers: it’s one small group of terrorists who perpetrate every naughty attack on Our Heroes throughout an entire country brimming with anti-American malice. The effects of propaganda, religious oppression and the curtailment of free expression renders the entire nation contemptuous at best and murderously bloodthirsty at worst against Americans in general and these Americans specifically.
The only help they can hope for is from a decent colonel called Faris Al Ghazi (Ashraf Barhom) and his loyal sidekick Haytham (Ali Suliman). The colonel has a personal stake in matters, in that whilst he resents the presence of the FBI goons, he wants to find out whether any of his men were in on the attack, since their uniforms were found at the scene. He also, surprisingly, doesn’t applaud the murder of innocents, American or otherwise, and doesn’t go in for that messy torture stuff as a way of finding out information. Unlike his peers and superiors, who are all about the torture.
There is friction between Ghazi and Fleury since they come from such different worlds, and Ghazi doesn’t appreciate the constant swearing of the Americans and their impious ways. He hems and haws until he finally throws in his lot with the FBI in the pursuit of the bastards making his people look bad.
If you can’t see the parallel they’re trying to draw with Iraq, then, seriously, you’re not trying hard enough.
It’s impossible to view this film without wondering how they expect people to take it seriously in the face of the shock-and-awful devastation of Iraq from both within and without. I guess the hope any filmmaker has is that their audience is dumb enough to approach any situation depicting the contemporary world as being as simplistic as this: America good, Other People, especially most Arabs, bad.
It makes me want to chant USA!, USA!, USA!, I tell you what.
But the simplistic manner in which they want to allude to and evade the Iraq War at the same time isn’t the real problem with the film. It could still have been fine if there’d been a more believable setup in the first place, and a script that wasn’t woeful.
The biggest problem is that you have these FBI agents speaking dialogue dumber than anything I’ve ever heard spoken by any of the housemates on any season of Big Brother.
Listen to some of this dialogue:
“Can we dial down the boobies?”, “Need a little check? Huh? Ah, you big queer!”, “I’m not a goddamn French-Canadian”, “And that’s gonna be a whole lotta ass kicking”.
Chris Cooper, Jennifer Garner, Justin Bateman, Jamie Foxx and even more people get really, really bad dialogue to speak. There are moments where, and I’m sure I’m projecting, they look embarrassed by what they were saying. I don’t blame them, but I don’t excuse them either.
And the scenario depicted, of FBI agents wearing fatigues parading around Saudi Arabia like they run the joint, is, how shall I say this, hard to believe.
The only way the story could have made sense is if the attack had been perpetrated on the residents and the families of servicemen and women at an army base. Sure the US has moved most of its command centres out of Saudi Arabia and to other places like Qatar and some other place starting with ‘I’ that doesn’t come to mind right now, but it still has training facilities and bases in the country, including in Riyadh. If the investigation had been conducted by, I dunno, US Army Intelligence, the USMC, hell, even the goons from NCIS or JAG, it would at least have made a lick of sense.
Not that it probably would have mattered that much, considering how poorly the plot plays out, and how awfully the film is resolved in a big shoot out that makes less sense than Mel Gibson and Amy Winehouse after a few slabs of beer and crack. To top it all off, the movie is recorded with a particularly aggressive form of shaky-cam, which exceeds anything I’ve ever seen in terms of provoking widespread irritation. The entire flick is so badly filmed that all I have is some fleeting impression of some Americans and some Saudis having a merry old time in a constantly running washing machine.
The representation of Saudis is less than complimentary, which is understandable if not justifiable. It’s aimed at an audience whose national consciousness is seen as having comfortably assimilated the disconnect of blaming Afghanistan and Iraq for the September 11 attacks on America the Brave even when the perpetrators were mostly Saudi, mentored by an alleged Saudi mastermind. For them, I guess it’s time to demonise the Saudis as well. But the depiction of Riyadh, its people and any other place in this vast country is, to put it mildly, comically idiotic.
For a film called The Kingdom, set in the contemporary kingdom of Saudi Arabia, it doesn’t really give any credible sense of what’s going on in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Sure, they refer to the history of the place, and the discovery of oil, but next to nothing about their place in the world now. It could just as easily have been the kingdom that Shrek now rules (oops, spoilers from Shrek the Third!).
Again, all would have been forgivable (or at least some of it would have been forgivable), even with its simplistic politics and mindless themes of blameless American exceptionalism striding heedlessly across the globe, if the film had been entertaining in a jingoistic or violent fashion. Instead, it insults the issues it timidly brings up, and irritates with its poor treatment of every issue it cares to kitchen sink.
The only moment of ambiguity, the only spark of intelligence comes at the end where two different sets of characters indicate the possible intractability of the problems the US faces extending its power overseas against or in alignment with Islamic interests, when two sets of antagonists both express the intention to kill every single one of their opponents. That’s grounds for building consensus and mutual interest between the two worlds, surely?
The film and the DVDs of this film are not worth the celluloid or the polycarbonate they are printed on. This film should only be watched by people who want to learn how not to make a flick about the War on Terror, the War on Islamic Extremism or any other War you want to think of.
Just don’t. This is incompetent filmmaking at its most mediocre.
4 times I wished for the actors to just give up and walk out of frame in disgust out of 10
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“Does he know where Bin Laden is? That would be a huge promotion for me.” – The Kingdom.
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