Movies: The Kingdom

Hello folks, we're on location from sunny California, where my brother is managing to get married today. I was able to get some good sleep last night, and the time difference has allowed me to wake up early enough to do a little (probably very little) posting.

Last weekend Bruce and I went to see The Kingdom, which I had been looking forward to for awhile. It looked to have a great cast and was very timely. I will say that the relationship we as a country have with Saudi Arabia scares me; I'm not at all confident that there isn't a sizeable portion of people there who want to kill us, but the leaders and diplomats work together and smile and talk out of both sides of their mouths- it all swirls together in an uneasy, oily mess that will be difficult to untangle until we can develop new energy sources.

Anyway, the movie, stars (on the American side, though I will say that the Saudi cast, especially Ashraf Barhom, who plays the lead Saudi investigator, is excellent), Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman (who knew he didn't have to be funny?) and Chris Cooper. This is a cast that I love love love- Jennifer Garner is so awesome and Jamie Foxx appears to get better in everything he does. Quick plot summary: four FBI investigators more or less scam their way into Saudi Arabia after a brutal terrorist attack on American oil workers to investigate the crime. Hamstrung by the politics of the situation, they work to do their jobs and solve the murders. It devolves into a reasonably formulaic bang-bang-shoot-em-up at the end.

I have to say that I pretty much agree with the linked NY Times review. It works out more like a CSI episode through most of the picture, which is interesting and entertaining; and the movie does not spend a lot of time contemplating the strange relationship we have with Saudi Arabia or any of the broader issues we have in the Middle East. It is a fast paced tense action/crime movie that moves along well, whose cast does a great job.

It suffers from a few plot holes and implausibilities. But the action is terrific- I was totally on the edge of my seat near the end- and the terrorist attack was truly awful. I flinched a couple of times (I find that my capacity for watching violence, particularly violence on innocent people, children, etc., has gone way down since I've had my daughter. I'm just too empathetic).

So, in all, a pretty good movie. Worth the $19.50 we spent for it.

However.

The last five minutes ruined the experience of seeing the movie for me. The last five minutes included a coda that was some kind of moral-equivalence bullshit that drew a direct parallel between the American FBI investigators and the people who carried out the terrorist attack. Is this what Hollywood thinks we are? We can argue about the presence of our military in Iraq, but I think we can agree that they are clearly uniformed soldiers rather than trying to blend in to wreak more havoc, and also, that they aren't specifically targeting civilians in guerrilla attacks, right? So where is the parallel? Also, I haven't seen any news of American terrorist attacks (in the true sense of terrorist attack- attacking innocents to create fear- again, not Iraq) lately. It was almost like the movie felt it had to say something Deep and Meaningful about the Middle East situation, when in fact the film stood on its own really well as a self-contained tense crime/action movie that only implicated the politics of the Middle East by the plot turns involving problems of access and with the subject matter of the movie. That would have been enough, Mr. Berg!

Anyway, after a few days, I can say that overall I enjoyed the movie, but I remain disgusted with whatever message the filmmakers were trying to send. Jeez, I'm no Red-Stater type person, but I was offended by the parallels the movie drew. I wouldn't say it ruined the movie for me, but it definitely took it way down. I would still recommend it as an entertaining matinee sort of movie. Watch for the title sequence, which is one of the better ones I've seen in awhile.