"I'm not saying America is perfect," Fleury says, "but we're pretty good at this." If by "this" he means making high-impact action movies, it's hard to argue. And The Kingdom, hair-raising as it is, is also curiously soothing in its depiction of US competence and righteousness.
Just as Rambo offered the fantasy of do-over on Vietnam, The Kingdom can be seen as a wishful revisionist scenario for the US response to Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. In some ways it's an anti-Iraq movie, not because it expresses opposition to the war there but rather because it makes no mention of it. Instead, the film spins a cathartic counter-narrative. After a murderous terrorist attack a few of our best people - four, rather than a few hundred thousand - go over to the country that spawned the terrorists, kill the bad guys and come home. And they even leave the door open for a sequel.
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