The opening scenes of The Kingdom” quickly trace our involvement in the Middle
East: 1933, Oil discovered in Saudi Arabia; 1938: The Americans come. 1945, FDR
meets publicly with the Saudi leaders. 2001, fifteen of the nineteen terrorists
who take down the World Trade Center are Saudis.
The scene
shifts to a horrific terrorist attack that kills families of U.S. civilians
playing softball at the U.S. compound in Riyadh. After the first response team
arrives, a second, far larger explosion is unleashed on a whole outdoors full of
civilian adults and their children. It’s grim, grisly, horrific, and largely
unexaggerated according to the actual footage we watch each night on CNN.
But when the
scene shifts to the fictional action flick that is on the minds of writer
Matthew Carnahan and director Peter Berg, the train jumps the tracks. We meet
Jamie Foxx, Chris Cooper, and Jennifer Garner at FBI headquarters in Washington
where they are determined to carry out their mission as lead agency in
protecting U.S. citizens. When the State Department and the White House refuse
permission, the team circumvents them in a covert flight from Andrews Air Force
Base to Saudi Arabia. Tell me another.
After the
team arrives, the momentum sinks into the slow pace of investigation while Jamie
Foxx assumes the attitude of the personal avenger. Cooper, Garner, and Foxx are
competent enough, but their characters are undeveloped and finally boring. The
picture is stolen by Ashraf Barhom who plays the honorable Arab detective who
teams with the Americans to identify the terrorists. Barhom has the emotional
weight to play a role in a complex story; so does the fine actor, Chris Cooper.
But Jamie Foxx is way off key. He seems not to know whether he is acting in a
thriller or a documentary. Lacking any understanding or new thinking about the
Middle East, the movie takes on the feel of a “Die Hard” film.
The whole
situation is alien and confusing to most of us in America who, try as we may,
have a devil of a time trying to understand centuries of Middle Eastern culture
and anger – at each other and at us. The movie reminds us of 5000 Saudi princes,
each with a palace of his own, all built indirectly by Exxon, Shell, Chevron and
their fellow oil companies who have been buying oil for decades to satisfy both
the needs and pleasures of a profligate United States. The good news is that
truly competent people are beginning to weigh in on the subject. We have read
“the Looming Tower” by Lawrence Wright and we have seen the superb movie, “In
the Valley of Elah.”
What can be
said of “The Kingdom”? Clearly, that the movie is convincing only in the early
documentary- style scenes. It is a pretender that sinks in the shadow of other
genuine contributions. What we don’t need is the Middle East as action
entertainment.
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