CINEMA: The Kingdom

It takes a few years for the zeitgeist in Hollywood to catch up with world events, which is why it is only this year we are finally getting a run of films dealing with the aftermath of 9/11 and what is happening in the Middle East. Although not set in Iran or Iraq, The Kingdom has very obviously been influenced by events there.

When two huge (and absolutely stunningly shot) terrorist explosions rip through an American compound in Ryadh in Saudi Arabia (the Kingdom of the title) scores of civilians and an FBI agent are massacred. The Bureau is keen to get its own investigative team to the city to find out what has happened, but American boots on Saudi soil is a sensitive issue – unless they are confined to the Green Zone.

After much diplomacy behind the scenes agent Ronald Fleury (Jamie Foxx) is given just five days to secretly get his team of forensic and explosive experts into the city and discover who was behind the attack. But what Fleury wants to do and what the Saudi authorities will let him do are two very different things and it is only when the local police Colonel Al Ghazi (Ashraf Barhom) intervenes for the Americans that the investigation really takes off.

This is also the point where the film takes off into a sequence of break-neck fast action scenes including car chases, street shoot-outs and kidnappings that really are edge of the seat stuff. However, the film itself lacks cohesion and its moralising is heavy handed and often intrusive. There’s a lot of American bravado and machismo on show that may play well to a home audience, but certainly won’t endear the film to many foreign nations. It’s also questionable if the only female member of the team (played by Jennifer Garner) would really be allowed to walk round Saudi with bare arms and her head uncovered. The performances are uniformly good, Barhom’s in particular, but it is the set piece explosions and the shots of the city (with Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates standing in for Saudi) that impress the most.
Dee Pilgrim