The Kingdom [2007] - DVD (Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, Chris Cooper, Jason Bateman, Jeremy Piven - Dir: Peter Berg)

Set in Saudi Arabia, The Kingdom is a political action thriller with good acting and wonderful visuals. Its so-so script, though, at times meanders aimlessly until a good explosion jolts the viewer's attention back to the screen. Jamie Foxx stars as FBI special agent Ronald Fleury, who leads an elite team into Saudi Arabia to find the terrorists who attacked American employees working in the Middle East. He has been given the unlikely deadline of five days to infiltrate the compound, with just his wit and his crew, which includes forensics expert Janet Mayes (Jennifer Garner), explosives guru Grant Sykes (Chris Cooper), and intelligence analyst Adam Leavitt (Jason Bateman). It's unclear how helpful smarmy U.S. diplomat Damon Schmidt (Jeremy Piven) will be, but Fleury knows enough to surmise that the media-hungry Schmidt might not be completely trustworthy. Foxx and Garner have wonderful screen presence, but it's Bateman and Piven who get the best lines. Director Peter Berg peppers The Kingdom with actors he has worked with in the past. Berg, who guest-starred on Alias opposite Garner, casts Tim McGraw in a small role here. (The country singer also had a co-starring role in Berg's 2004 film Friday Night Lights.) And Kyle Chandler and Minka Kelly--two of Berg's lead actors from the Friday Night Lights television series, , make appearances in The Kingdom. The action sequences he creates are impressive and generate a sense of panic that The Kingdom producer Michael Mann (Miami Vice) undoubtedly applauds. While a tauter script would've rounded out the action nicely, the action in many cases does speak for itself. --Jae-Ha Kim

Customer Reviews of The Kingdom [2007]

Michael W. Perry
Seattle, WA United States
8th January 2009

Hollywood as Bully and Coward
If you like action flicks with exploding cars and more bullets flying than in some wars, then youll enjoy this film. The basic plot is good and the actors are talented. However, two major flaws may spoil your enjoyment.

The first is driven a genre that demands violence, violence and more violence. Its FBI agents are more like Rambo than real agents. Theyre too proficient at street combat with automatic weapons to be believable, and theyre too obsessed with a revenge-filled killing them all to be real pros. Good investigators dont gun down the little guys in a crime. They use them to get to the big guys.

The second problem is more serious. Hollywoodin this case Universal Picturesis absolute terrified by terrorism and it shows in the films they are producing. Illustrating that the bully and coward often inhabit the same skin, the films bullying bloat of violence closes with a cowardly pairing of scenes where the terrorists murder of children on a playground is equated to the FBIs pursuit of terrorists. Its Hollywoods way of saying to terrorists, Blow up a school or a subway, but leave us alone. Were harmless. More worthless than harmless, Id say.

Imagine a film like Patton closing with scenes that equate the U.S. Third Army crossing the Rhine with the Nazi S.S. at Auschwitz, and you get a taste of just how foul the ending to this film is.

Michael W. Perry, editor of Dachau Liberated

one-eyed Jack
England
28th December 2008

Memorable for its raw violence rather than political revelation
The FBI attempt to seek justice following a huge explosion in Saudi Arabia that killed many American expats, among others.

At first the film gives the impression of being something of a dramatised documentary, with its bullet-point summary of US-Saudi relations dating back 70+ years when oil was first found - by accident, apparently, as it was water that was being drilled for. So I didn't have high hopes, but it soon turned out to be anything but a docu-drama, and somewhat surprisingly produced some interesting character development even if the script was rather uninspiring. The film is notable for irritatingly jerky hand-held camerawork throughout, compensated to a large degree by an admittedly silly but nevertheless breathtaking and exciting pursuit and shoot-out at the end. For those who like street-warfare action Middle-East style with RPGs, grenades, powerful machine guns and the token beheading on video this should tick all the right boxes; I wasn't expecting it and didn't order it for that reason yet I admired the intensity and the direction anyway. After the shooting has stopped and both sides count their dead and lick their wounds, the underlying message is that the battles may be won or lost but the war goes on regardless. And who can say with any definition who the good guys and the bad really are?

The film-makers have made a more than decent job of turning happening-right-now issues into a watchable story. It's rarely boring but ultimately it depends on raw violence to leave its mark in the memory.

Author - The Virtual Trilogy
Dublin, Ireland
10th December 2008

An above average action movie
If you like the TV shows Criminal Minds and CSI, with a bit of West Wing thrown in for good measure, then this DVD should appeal. A group of FBI agents are flown in to investigate a car bomb atrocity in Saudi Arabi, encountering not only the problems of solving a crime, but also a completely different culture. How they cope with this is one of the strong points of the movie and that, along with the incredible ambush scene on a crowded highway, are what raises this movie above the average.

I particularly liked the DVD extras - especially the detailed analysis of how the fast moving motorised ambush scene was carried out, as well as the way the final showdown was put together.

An action movie with strong performances, and intelligent script that makes you think, and incredible action sequences.

movie maniac
south wales
18th November 2008

2 out of 3 ain't bad
the film starts off well showing the political ties between the countries over the years , then comes the terrorist bombing and again its well done then its over to the fbi headquarters and i found this stage of the film up until they start investigating the bomb site in saudi arabia a bit boring and jumping from scene to scene following the different characters is always confusing {i found it far easier reading the subtitles }.
i found the way this is filmed very similar to black hawk down and if you liked that film you will love this one , once the fbi and saudi police start tracking the terrorist it gets very tense and exciting and i won't spoil anything but the last 30 minutes of this film is utterly fantastic and some of the action sequences are so realistic it virtually blows you away . by the time the credits start to roll this film will have won you over but it is hard going in the middle third but please stay with it because the finale is a stormer.

Bill
Cornwall, UK
15th November 2008

Stomach-churning
For the first hour 'The Kingdom' comes across as one of those reasonably entertaining detective thrillers, where out-of-town cops have to battle against local bureaucracy and incompetence, only this time the cops are FBI agents working in Saudi Arabia. But around the halfway mark the film discards any pretence of intelligence, and the hole-ridden plot is buried beneath one of the longest and most tedious gun-battles you're likely to see.

Nevertheless, the film still raises some important questions.

Firstly, why is an actor as talented as Chris Cooper appearing in this ridiculous, objectionable and shallow piece of American 'War on Terror' propaganda? And secondly, when will directors realise that jerky, hand-held, so-called documentary-style camerawork and jump-cut editing do not make a film more exciting, they just make the audience feel nauseous?

If you want to see Cooper at his best, appearing in a genuinely suspenseful movie, then buy the FBI spy thriller 'Breach' instead. Or John Sayles' marvellously subversive 'Lone Star'. Those are two films that really are worth watching.