The Kingdom is an entertaining film that suffers from an acute identity crisis, unable to decide whether it wants to be a Bruckheimer action flick or a Syriana-esque political thriller.
The movie bursts out of the gate in a startling fashion, when a terrorist's bomb rips through an oil company housing compound in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killing hundreds of Americans stationed there. An elite FBI team, comprised of Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, Chris Cooper and Jason Bateman, is dispatched to Riyadh to investigate the matter, and they immediately encounter an array of political and cultural roadblocks in their pursuit of the terrorist culprits.
After the stellar beginning, The Kingdom's story slows down considerably, morphing into a tedious episode of "CSI: Saudi Arabia" as the team carefully canvasses ground zero for evidence. It's here that director Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights, The Rundown) makes his plea for political relevance, and the story suffers as a result. Seemingly sensing the prolonged lull, Berg picks up the pace with the film's riveting climax, a superb house-to-house battle reminiscent of Alfonso Cuaron's legendary urban warfare sequence in Children of Men.
Unfortunately, The Kingdom left a bad taste in my mouth with its final scene, a moment of such heavy-handed, bonk-you-over-the-head irony that it nearly wrecked the movie for me entirely.
The Kingdom features a fine cast, though at times Berg seems at a loss to figure out what to do with his actors. While Foxx turns in a solid performance, Bateman and Cooper are woefully underutilized and Garner seems oddly out of place. Turning in the best performance by far is Ashraf Barhom, who plays a Saudi colonel torn by conflicting duties toward his job, his government and his faith. A relative unknown, Barhom effectively steals the show as the movie's only multi-dimensional character.
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