Explosive 'Kingdom'

Taut and tense, Peter Berg's intelligent, finely acted thriller keeps the action coming

By Michael Sragow | Sun Movie Critic

September 28, 2007

(B+) If the anti-terrorist thriller The Kingdom had been released in 2004, it might have helped John Kerry win the presidential election.

With eye-opening audacity, it adopts the same message that brought ridicule on Kerry: The fight against terrorism should be a massive police action, not a war. And director Peter Berg, who directed the movie Friday Night Lights and is the creative force behind the TV show of the same name (one of the best network episodic dramas ever), fills out the theme with potency and thrust.

From the opening sequence of suicide attackers slaughtering and wounding hundreds of oil-company employees at a Western residential compound in Riyadh, to the daringly prolonged ambush, chase and shoot out that closes the film, Berg doesn't let up on the tension, even when the action is bloodless.

This movie, about a four-person FBI team that maneuvers its way into Saudi Arabia to nail the killers, boasts an explosive unity of form and content. It's about obliterating the conventional wisdom in Washington as well as Riyadh.

In The Kingdom, fighting merciless bombers doesn't mean annihilating one's own moral scruples. It does mean taking politics out of the problem-solving equation and not settling for easy initial victories.

Status quo forces in Washington, from the attorney general (Danny Huston) on down, don't want Special Agent Ronald Fleury (Jamie Foxx) to fly to Saudi Arabia with a team including ordnance guru Grant Sykes (Chris Cooper), forensics specialist Janet Mayes (Jennifer Garner) and case analyst Adam Leavitt (Jason Bateman).

Even after Fleury uses the threat of bad publicity to plant his squad in Saudi Arabia, they are as hamstrung by local hierarchy and protocol as their closest Saudi counterparts, Col. Faris Al Ghazi (Ashraf Barhom) and Saudi Police Sergeant Haytham (Ali Suliman).

Much of the film is an exercise in dynamic frustration, as both governments' personnel (including Jeremy Piven in a tip-top satiric turn as a frantic U.S. diplomat) spend more energy cloaking the operation in ritualized courtesies than in helping investigators crack the case.

But the movie is consistently involving. Matthew Michael Carnahan's script takes familiar action-film ploys into territory that's unfamiliar, and not just because of the Saudi cityscapes. Other films have depicted the futility, ugliness and potential for backfires of torture. But The Kingdom actually makes a torture victim a lead character who refuses to sink to the level of his persecuters. This movie doesn't truck in moral relativism. Yet it does suggest that "killing them all" is not the best goal for any country or movement.

The action scenes detonate in stages - a tactic that doesn't merely keep an audience on edge but also brings home what "heightened state of alertness" means when you scrape away color codes and euphemistic language.

Director Berg has traveled a vast distance from his repulsive debut in the black comedy Very Bad Things. He's on his way to becoming a master of fact-based kinetic filmmaking, like Paul Greengrass (of Bloody Sunday, United 93 and the Bourne movies). As TV's Friday Night Lights shows, he's gotten there the same way Greengrass has - not by using a jittery camera and quick cutting to provide an illusion of reality, but by filling his sets and locations with so much realistic detail that only a roving lens and complicated editing can take it all in.

He makes you, as well as his characters, strive to catch things from the corners of your eyes. A marathon stretch of concatenated calamities starts with highway carnage on an international scale and culminates in the most nerve-shredding depictions of door-to-door fighting since Black Hawk Down. The violence is shocking, not gratuitous; it's in the nature of professional fighters doing whatever they must to get the job done.

You might wish there were more distinction to the individual characters. But Berg is canny at capturing group interactions: The hypnotically hyper-aware Foxx and the strong, sensitive Barhom splendidly convey the growing connections between Fleury and Al Ghazi. The eloquently moody Suliman as Al Ghazi's second-in-command, and, as Fleury's crew, the gnarly Cooper, the stalwart Garner, and even the jokey Bateman are equally good at depicting how their leaders' burgeoning understanding trickles down.

There's nothing else that's "trickle-down" about this movie. It's a film that urges international leaders to bring grass-roots expertise to arid, menacing landscapes.

>>>The Kingdom (Universal) Starring Jamie Foxx, Chris Cooper, Jennifer Garner, Ashraf Barhom, Ali Suliman. Directed by Peter Berg. Rated R. Time 111 minutes.