The Kingdom (2007)
When you boil The Kingdom down to its essentials, paring away the name actors and the contemporary, showy in its lack of blocking choreography, you basically have a Rambo movie. A movie where one (or several) person/people are allowed to go to a foreign land and risk years of carefully maintained, vague civility in the name of justice (aka vengeance aka ensuring you’re still the biggest dick in the room.)
I’m generally not a logic person in an action film, but The Kingdom seems to think it takes contemporary issues seriously, so its fair game, and, in this case, pretty insulting to even the laziest follower of current events. What the FBI does to bully its way onto Saudi ground is absurd. What happens once they get onto Saudi ground is absurd. The brutal firefight that finally picks things up in Act three is awesome, but even more absurd, in that the global implications of such a free for all aren’t considered in the slightest bit.
I’ll confess. I’m part of what’s wrong with the American population in terms of current events, especially our never ending, impossible to decipher issues over seas. I don’t watch much news (although as biased, sensationalistic and ad oriented as it is, I don’t think I’m missing much). I don’t follow politics closely. I don’t, particularly, give a shit. I think things are fucked up, but I’m not interested in shouldering the responsibility to fix it.
Neither is The Kingdom, but at least I didn’t make a movie glorifying the American sense of entitlement that represents one of the core reasons that most nations hate us. The deck is unreasonably stacked here: we see the Jamie Foxx character at school with his son for no other reason than to excuse his gung ho fervor later on, we are given a Saudi who is (kinda) sympathatic to our cause so the film can’t be accused of racism. The top inner government brass are presented as the typical, candy asses that know nothing of the ass that needs to be kicked in order to preserve our, well, you get the idea.
If The Kingdom wasn’t boring, I’d probably forgive most of what I just said. Morality should not be strictly considered in pulpy action thrillers, id should be given free reign somewhere, and movies is a safe somewhere. But the film, until the last thirty minutes, is largely boring, a by the book procedural with little surprise and a lot of tedious governmental jargon.
Peter Berg, a character actor, and now director, has, up until this point, made a career in making films that were always better than you’d expect (Very Bad Things, The Rundown, Friday Night Lights). For once, I went into a Berg film with decent expectations, and I got mildly burned with a self-righteous, hypocritical ass kicker. Very Bad Things was immoral and exhilarating because it knew it. The Kingdom is frustrating, and a little more dangerous, because it presents an equally florid situation as a right to bear arms.
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