[Movie Review] THE KINGDOM
You all know how excited I was about seeing Peter Berg’s The Kingdom right? I start championing the flick back on our old stompin ground when the teaser first dropped at the early point of this year. I was insanely jealous when Kristina stepped up with her Guest Review and everyone I know whose seen it has been raving about it.
It was obvious that I was going to drop everything and head off to a preview screening at the first available opportunity. But did the film live up to all the hype that I’d allowed to build up inside my mind?
You all know the plot by now right? Let me recap: A terrorist bomb detonates inside a Western housing compound in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and a major international incident is kick started as a result. While diplomats slowly debate over overseas territorialism and the like, passionate FBI Special Agent Ronald Fleury (Jamie Foxx) quickly assembles an elite team made up of fellow agents Grant Sykes (Chris Cooper), Janet Mayes (Jennifer Garner) and Adam Leavitt (Jason Bateman) and manages to side-step his superiors and slide off on a secret, barely legal, five-day trip into Saudi Arabia to locate the madman behind the bombing.
Upon arriving in the desert kingdom, Fleury and his team discover Saudi authorities are suspicious and unwelcoming of the American ‘interlopers’ who they see as an interference into what they consider a ‘local’ matter. Continually restricted by protocol-and with the clock ticking Fleury, Sykes, Mayes and Leavitt find their expertise worthless without the trust of their Saudi counterparts. The Saudis, in turn, only want to locate the terrorist in their homeland on their own terms without “international protocol” getting in the way.
Eventually, Fleury’s crew come to discover a like-minded partner in Saudi Colonel Al-Ghazi (Ashraf Barhoum), who helps them navigate royal politics, unlock the secrets of the crime scene and come to understand the workings of an extremist cell bent on further destruction. Obsessively driven right to the killer’s front door, the FBI and Colonel Al-Ghazi find themselves in a deadly confrontation and a searing fight for their own lives.
I’ve heard the film unfairly described as “Syrianna for dumb people”. That’s not the case. Syrianna was a film that seemed to take great delight in inundating the viewer with all it’s fact-heavy research, ahead of whether it made a penetrable viewing experience. The Kingdom wants to tell a political story within the thriller genre to the maximum mainstream audience. It most certainly doesn’t ‘dumb down’ in order to complete this process!
I loved The Kingdom – from it’s audacious opening credits sequence right the way through to it’s bitter final line that will resonate for decades to come. The film gave to me everything that I could possibly want from a viewing experience; it challenged me to think, it put me on the edge of my seat, it scared a stain into my tighty-whiteys, it made me laugh and it brought tears to my eyes at certain junctures.
It’s a superbly made film that tells a good story, with great characters, in a manner that has you enthralled from the start. It shows the investigative process in all it’s intricate, methodical detail (and has suffered sly digs about coming across as CSI: Saudi as a result from many a critic, including our own Kristina!) yet isn’t afraid to up the pace with some cracking action sequences when the story requires it, not to just shake up an audience.
The action sequences, when they come – most notably the nerve-shredding, genuninely brilliant climax that leads from a superb high speed motorway abush into a bullet-ridden dust-up in a downtown housing estate – are brilliantly shot and never cross that line from shaky, docu-style hand-held camera work into the Michael Bay style of attention-deficeit filmmaking. And because director Peter Berg has taken the time to give us characters we really do like and care about, the action beats with more of a heart then you’d expect.
The focus of most of the attention in terms of performance seems to be pushed towards Jamie Foxx and Jennifer Garner. Both are excellent with Garner really coming into her own in the film’s third act. However, for me, the real gems were Chris Cooper and Jason Bateman. Cooper gives his normally solid support, as you’d expect, and Bateman is an out and out revelation. He’s initially presented as the pithy comic support with a one-liner here and there, but as the film pushes on, he has our mouth’s agog and our hearts racing as he fights and claws for his own life with a sense of drama and realism we never would have expected from the guy who once played the lead in Teen Wolf Too.
Bateman, obviously with assistance from director Peter Berg and hands-on producer Michael Mann (who, as a director, knows a thing or two about this sort of intelligent yet adrenaline pumping style of filmmaking), perfectly judges his character to the point that he plays ‘real’ and not as some ‘comedy sidekick’. There’s a moment towards the end of the film involving his and Jennifer Garner’s character – you’ll know it when you see it – where the entire film and his character could have gone down in smoke, with one ‘action hero’ style one-liner being spouted in the aftermath of the incident a la something out of Stallone or Willis territory. The film point blank refuses to defuse the moment with such a thing and the scene becomes exceptionally emotional as a result! It was a clever, solid decision!
The supporting cast, too, is uniformly excellent – Richard Jenkins, Danny Huston, Ashley Scott, director Berg briefly, Jeremy Piven and Tim McGraw, amongst others – offering up the exact sort of assistance to the brilliant quartet of leads that you need the second-string players to do in order to make the film excel. Ashraf Barhoum, as Saudi Colonel Al-Ghazi, deserves special mention and (because the Academy loves nothing more than the occasional expression of ‘tokenism’) he would be most deserved of an Oscar nod for Best Supporting Actor.
In fact, The Kingdom, as a whole, deserves Oscar attention. I shit ye not, and the fact that Universal delayed it’s release to attract such attention suggests I’m not the only one thinking it. Peter Berg deserves a Director nomination, the film itself deserves a Best Picture nod (if you think I’m overstating this film’s case then check it out and watch the opening terrorist attack on the Western Compound; one of the most accomplished and assured sequences you will see and also one of the best pieces of on-screen terrorism in the history of cinema – it had my mouth agape and tears rolling down my cheeks!) and Matthew Michael Carnahan most definitely deserves Oscar attention for his thoughtful, intricately plotted yet high octane screenplay.
The film isn’t perfect, I can admit that. The events that transpire for our protagonists to get from America onto Saudi Arabian soil is a tad mystifying and could have been clearer. Also Danny Elfman’s musical score is a little underwhelming and there are parts where he seems to have cribbed wholesale from Peter Berg’s other film, Friday Night Lights, and the music provided by Brian Reitzell and David Torn. Elfman isn’t a composer I have a great deal of time for, the exception being his work in Midnight Run obviously! All his music appears to sound the same over and over again. Here, he has a chance to enter into the adrenaline-pumping leagues of say Hans Zimmer or Trevor Rabin and he fluffs it!
However, whilst I’m saying the film isn’t perfect, it’s damn near close in my eyes. I had a truly brilliant experience with this from start to finish and consider it to be one of the strongest films of the year. It’s currently being dismissed as “just an action movie” or “just a thriller” or whatever, but it is something much, much more than that. It’s a really quite brilliant, intelligent mainstream Hollywood production that never once insults you whilst telling a potentially provocative story without any desire to mine controversy.
1/2
… and check it out as soon as you possibly can! A genuinely brilliant piece of cinema and further evidence that Peter Berg is an unstoppable talent as a director!
6 Responses to “[Movie Review] THE KINGDOM”
It is a great movie, but I still think the pace in the beginning was a touch slow. Still a great flick, but I’m not entirely sure about it being an Oscar contender.
I think I may agree with you regarding the pace of the film Kristina. It could have been tighter, especially considering even at the pace it took the events portrayed that gets our heroes over to Saudi isn’t especially clear. However, I still loved it and think on a director or writer level this should be worth the recognition of a nomination!
Different strokes for different folks though eh?
Again, a great review Gazz (and Kristina). I enjoyed it but I had problems with it as both a film and in the way it tackled its subject matter.
While the action-packed ending was an interesting attempt at visualising the moral dilemma central to the story, which Foxx then summises in a moment of sombre reflection, I felt that the idea worked better on the page than it did on the screen. Coming after a considered and well structured narrative of the investigation, the action is almost too violent, the characters becoming too much like automatons when duty called. I appreciate that the sequence is very much a kill or be killed scenario but I felt that the film deserved better, particularly the relationship between Foxx’s FBI agent and Barhoum’s Al-Ghazi.
I like Berg a lot as an actor and a director but I think he could have been bolder here, maybe fought different battles to get a film on screen that asked more questions about the war on terror and the general attitude of Americans towards the Middle East and vice versa, if that was his intention which he seems to suggest it was to a point. What we got was a violent example of how reckless Americans can be in countries that they take for granted and ignore, and while some liberals will attack this film as nothing more than propaganda (a lazy argument because it is clearly not), I do appreciate what Berg was trying to do with that idea but the film is frustrating — the inspired idea of establishing a timeline of events during the opening credits is hobbled by other decisions, like the lingering and masochistic close-ups of our heroes at the end. I guess it’s this that bugged me. Now, as entertainment it works very well but it hints at more without really delivering.
I’ll stick with Syriana, which is a much better film all round. It balanced the demands of a thriller and drama with insight, giving an intelligent if cynical portrayal of how the West interacts with the East covertly, politically and economically.
Trackbacks
What's Your Opinion?