The Kingdom (USA 2007, Action/Drama/Thriller), Writer: Matthew Michael Carnahan; Director: Peter Berg
The Kingdom gets off to a fantastic start, but unfortunately it never matches that again until the very end.
It begins with an animated account of America’s involvement in the Middle East, and particularly in Saudi Arabia. The filmmakers should have used the opening sequence as a trailer because it sells the film far more effectively than did the actual trailers that I saw. The sequence is gripping, fascinating and brilliantly executed. But the trailers suggest a generic Hollywood action flick, and that’s what The Kingdom is for the most part, so at least they can’t be accused of false advertising.
The bulk of the film feels hollow. It follows an elite FBI team on the hunt for Saudi terrorists who bombed a Western housing compound in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
The filmmakers made a visible effort to show that people in the Middle East aren’t so very different from people in the Western world. We see them reading to their children and praying before bed, in much the same way that Americans do each night. The sequence comes immediately after a scene in which the FBI team members, camped out in a Riyadh gymnasium, quiz each other on the number of virgins Muslim men are entitled to when they reach paradise. It’s a nice contrast, and a study in how the west views the east, but it’s a little too heavy-handed for my taste.
The Kingdom also goes to great lengths to make the point that the Saudi leadership is just as keen to arrest the Saudi terrorists as are the Americans. It’s an important point to make, but it would be nice if all those points could be made with a bit more subtlety.
A couple of major objections to The Kingdom:
1. The exploitative scenario involving the kidnapping and potential beheading of one of the FBI team members. I thought this was in poor taste given that this has happened repeatedly in the real world. It’s bad enough when trendy horror films glorify torture to capitalize on cheap thrills, but at least the scenarios they depict are usually far removed from reality. To use something that has happened to North Americans in recent history, and to make light of it after the fact (in one of the film’s very few lighter moments), bothered me.
2. As the only female member of the FBI team, Jennifer Garner is distracting. Not because she’s female, but because she’s not convincing in her role. I couldn’t take her seriously when she spouted intelligence about the Saudi cell, or anything else for that matter. Her soft, whispery delivery just didn’t cut it.
By the film’s conclusion, when director Peter Berg draws a somewhat forced parallel between two storylines, I was expecting the worst. But the film surprised me with what is probably the perfect closing line for The Kingdom. It’s an honest reflection of the way many people feel about all this conflict. It conveys both our fear and our misunderstanding, and although the line is frightening to consider, it represents a truly human reaction to something that threatens to take away life, family and freedom. That line alone elevates the film above other typical Hollywood action movies about the topic-du-jour: it proves the filmmakers weren’t afraid to tell the truth, even if it isn’t pretty.