Not Coming to a Theater Near You

The Kingdom / USA / 2007

A deeply crass and misguided attempt to squeeze a few cheap thrills out of the War on Terror. It’s hard to say what director Peter Berg thinks he’s doing, but one gets the impression he believes this to be a fair minded, even handed look at the US’s conflicted relationship with Saudi Arabia. But the film sets out it’s stall in the opening few minutes- Americans play baseball, love their kids and have a good time, while the Arabs are either officious and ineffective or irredeemably evil, forcing their own children to witness acts of brutal terrorism. Things barely improve- we’re forced to endure lines like ‘The first round in this war is over, and Al Qaeda know they lost’, a sentiment which presupposes that A) there’s a unified force called ‘Al Qaeda’, B) that ‘they’ are fighting a war with ‘us’, and C) that they lost, which given the current world situation seems a ludicrous assertion- if the Americans are lucky, they might just squeeze a tie. The film almost redeems itself in the last 30 seconds with an obvious but insightful little coda, but it’s not enough to wipe out the memory of all that’s gone before.

And political naïveté aside, this just isn’t a very good film. The plot thumps along predictably, the good guys are insufferably good while the bad ones are better off dead. One doesn’t exactly expect great things from Jamie Foxx and Jennifer Garner, but surely Chris Cooper knows better than this- standing up to his waist in muddy water barking good ol’ boyisms at a group of workshy nutscratching Saudis feels like a major step down.

by Tom Huddleston | Source: DVD
20 Dec 2007 9:06 AM | Submit Comment