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Media Room

By Kelly Jane Torrance
December 21, 2007

Jennifer Garner, Ali Suliman, Jamie Foxx and Chris Cooper (from left) risk their lives in Saudi Arabia in "The Kingdom."

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Some observers made much of the fact that The Kingdom (Universal, $29.98) was the most successful of this year's crop of war-on-terror-themed movies — although it didn't even make back its estimated $80 million budget in the U.S., with just a $47.5 million gross.

It's true that "The Kingdom" is the most friendly to American military and law-enforcement intervention. "In the Valley of Elah" suggested that the Iraq war, with its mixed motives, is having deleterious effects on the soldiers fighting it; "Rendition" focused on the CIA's use of regimes that torture to question suspects; "Redacted" told a story of American soldiers' crimes in Iraq and "Lions for Lambs" had some fierce debate about a less controversial operation, the one in Afghanistan.

However, it's probably its promise of action — something those other movies were rather short on — that put "The Kingdom" on top. I suspect many viewers were disappointed on that score, though. There are really only two fast-moving sequences in the film, one at the beginning when terrorists murder dozens at an American military installation in Saudi Arabia, and one at the end when the FBI agents who go there to investigate are ambushed on their way out. That last one is pretty exciting, though.

In between, the film is something of a snoozer. FBI agent Ronald Fleury (Jamie Foxx) heads a team that includes Janet Mayes (Jennifer Garner), Grant Sykes (Chris Cooper) and Adam Leavitt (Jason Bateman, who provides some comic relief in an otherwise heavy film).

It's a talented group of actors, but they're given little to do in the middle of this movie besides twiddle their thumbs waiting for the Saudis to give them permission to investigate, and then, when they have it, to sift through sand and mud.

Perhaps that's because, as director Peter Berg says in the DVD's commentary track, he didn't want to make a movie that was political or militaristic. Of course, that turned out to be difficult to avoid. How do you make a movie about the complicated situation in Saudi Arabia, which has inspired terrorists for years, without delving into these issues?

"The Kingdom" would have been a better movie if Mr. Berg and scriptwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan (who, oddly enough, also wrote the anything-but-evasive "Lions for Lambs") had approached them head on. Instead, we get a slightly simplistic film that shows the Americans making friends in the apartment complex in which they just had a deadly shootout.

In the commentary track, Mr. Berg says he focused on an FBI team because that let him avoid politics: "They're college-educated scientists who like to collect evidence and go after bad guys." Revenge is certainly a big motive for the agents, but it's been played down from the original script, it seems: Deleted scenes included on the disc include even more discussion of the theme.

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