Heaven Can Wait in This ‘Kingdom’
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The opening credits of “The Kingdom” scroll over a stylized timeline, interspersed with newsreel-style footage that traces Saudi history onward from the kingdom’s creation in 1932. We see Saudi Arabia and America becoming increasingly intertwined, the rise of Islamist resistance, and Colin Powell perched uncomfortably in a palatial room. (And did I see a Star of David morph into a star on the American flag?) Finally, an animated bar graph shows that in 2000, Saudi Arabia was the world’s no. 1 producer of oil, and America was the no. 1 consumer. The two 3-D bars jut upward to become twin black columns, and an animated airplane slams into them.
And that’s how you spin a good old-fashioned shoot-’em-up out of a hopelessly complex geopolitical riddle.
As an action flick crammed into a political thriller, “The Kingdom” is better than it deserves to be, though it never quite finds its rhythm. It begins with a horrific terrorist attack at a heavily guarded Riyadh compound populated by American oil company employees. The Dave Matthews Band plays over a loudspeaker during an afternoon baseball game, when a coterie of gunmen dressed as Saudi police shoot their way through a guard station and commence a series of quickly escalating explosions. The sequence is impressively staged by both the film’s director, Peter Berg, and by the attackers he has cast. It’s difficult to tell who is assaulting and who is defending, who is a cop herding the families to safety and who is a suicide bomber.
The task of sorting who’s with us and who’s against us soon becomes much easier. Flash to a crack team of FBI investigators, led by alpha male Jamie Foxx as Special Agent Ronald Fleury. The always-likeable Jason Bateman provides the requisite wisecracks. And it’s nice to see Chris Cooper back in the bureau’s good graces after betraying it so spectacularly as Robert Hanssen in this year’s “Breach.”
Poor Jennifer Garner, who furrows her brow earnestly throughout, is tasked with most of the film’s thudding chunks of exposition. These professionals would not have to explain to each other why the Saudi royal family historically has not allowed them to investigate on the ground, nor would they refer to their slick nemesis as “Attorney General Young” among themselves. Yet if the film wants to be something more accessible than Stephen Gaghan’s impenetrable 2005 non-blockbuster “Syriana,” it needs to help the audience grasp the landscape.
Fleury eventually pulls strings with an investigative reporter for the Washington Post, played by Frances Fisher in a Judith Milleresque bob, to allow the team access to the scene of the crime. Upon touchdown on the tarmac, Ashraf Barhom, who portrays the stoic Saudi Colonel Faris Al Ghazi, becomes the standout actor of the film, in part because his restrained role doesn’t allow for the kind of swaggering hot-dogging the Americans engage in.
Despite a few syrupy scenes establishing Fleury’s sensitive fatherhood and generous team leadership, his cautious friendship with Al Ghazi, who’s been assigned to escort the team through the local bureaucracy, is the film’s emotional center. The two also engage in a fair bit of buddy-flick banter: “Let me ask you, do you think Allah is on our side or theirs?” “Well, Faris, we’re about to find out.” Commence with busting down the door and opening fire.
The film’s screenwriter, Matthew Michael Carnahan, has said that he wanted to portray what a murder investigation would look like on Mars. Indeed, a sense of alien strangeness persists as the team is first locked in a gymnasium without explanation, then called to the local prince’s palace, where they must kowtow by complimenting his tamed raptors. It’s only when the procedural cluegathering escalates into a fullscale street fight, waged in and around an apartment building outside the safety of the American compound, that the film becomes what it wanted to be all along. Grenades are lobbed, rocket launchers are drawn, crotches are stabbed, and all is set right in the world. Although it must be asked: Are we obligated to use the audio technology that recreates the sound of bullets tearing through flesh simply because it exists?
Outside of those sequences, Mr. Berg seems sobered, sometimes even cowed, by the complexity of his setting — or perhaps he just has his mind on foreign grosses. He is careful to include a tender sequence portraying Al Ghazi at home, praying with his family. And at several points we see the adorable — if not always innocent — children and grandchildren of the terrorist bigwig behind the attacks.
The movie’s surprisingly downbeat last line is repeated on opposite sides of the world by Mr. Foxx’s character and a Saudi terrorist. It’s a bit of a copout, almost washing away the moral chasm between the Americans’ mission and that of their opponents. In the end, even if we don’t understand the bad guys, we know who the good guys are.