What good is geopolitical turmoil if you can't have some fun with it? Hollywood has been posing that rhetorical question for a long time now - from Ninotchka to Rambo by way of a battalion of World War II combat pictures - but it has so far been a bit squeamish about turning the various post-Sept. 11 conflicts into grist for escapist entertainment.
The Kingdom, a whodunit/blow-'em-up directed by Peter Berg, corrects this lapse by taking aim at the ethical nuances and ideological contradictions of the war on terror and blasting away.
Berg, an actor whose directing skills improve with each project (his last for the big screen was the underrated Friday Night Lights), shows himself adept at the rapid cutting and hectic camerawork that are fast becoming the lingua franca of action filmmaking.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF UNIVERSAL STUDIOS
The Kingdom takes the breathless visual precision of the Jason Bourne movies out of the abstract hall-of-mirrors universe of intra-CIA skulduggery and into a semi-plausible world of international tension. Rather than explore that tension, as some other, more ostentatiously serious movies coming out shortly seem poised to do, Berg and Matthew Michael Carnahan, the screenwriter, do what they can to relieve it with fireballs and frantic chases. The result is a slick, brutishly effective genre movie: Syriana for dummies.
Which is not entirely a put-down. Intricate, earnest puzzles have their place in the movie cosmos, but so do lean, linear stories with clearly defined villains and heroes and lots of explosions.
The members of the cast, which includes two recent Academy Award winners (Jamie Foxx and Chris Cooper), do not trouble themselves exploring the finer points of their craft, but their unpretentious professionalism is nonetheless satisfying to watch. Foxx does most of his acting with the muscles in his jaw and his upper arm, delivering terse dialogue in a silky whisper. Cooper punches the folksiness buttons as a forensics expert whose aw-shucks manner masks a steel-trap mind. Jason Bateman is the class clown, and Jennifer Garner, no slouch in the jaw-flexing department, also exercises her tear ducts and her trigger finger.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF UNIVERSAL STUDIOS
The four of them play FBI investigators who travel to Saudi Arabia (the kingdom of the title) to investigate a horrific double terrorist attack on US oil company workers and their families. The team's trip is opposed by the State Department and the lily-livered attorney general (Danny Huston), who don't want to antagonize an important ally. Backed up by their no-nonsense boss (Richard Jenkins), the Forensic Four nonetheless head to Riyadh.
Their motives are personal as well as professional, since one of their colleagues was killed in the attacks. Their presence is barely tolerated by the Saudi authorities, many of whom are either incompetent or in cahoots with the jihadis. Meanwhile, Jeremy Piven shows up as an embassy flunky whose job is to prevent Special Agent Fleury (Foxx) and his colleagues from doing theirs.
But Fleury recognizes a fellow good cop in the person of Faris al-Ghazi (Ashraf Barhom), a Saudi colonel who helps the Americans both before and after the bullets and rocket-propelled grenades start flying. Once they do, the good guys are in the familiar, physically perilous but morally gratifying position of being out-manned and outgunned with the cavalry nowhere in sight.
"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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