Action-packed: The hackneyed Kingdom of Jamie Foxx's new thriller

Last updated at 16:30 05 October 2007


The Kingdom is a bog-standard, big-budget, buddy-buddy picture being marketed to look as if it's more serious and intelligent than it is.

After a massacre of 100 American servicemen and their families in Saudi Arabia, FBI special agent Ronald Fleury (Jamie Foxx) and his crack team of three (Jennifer Garner, Chris Cooper and Justin Bateman) negotiate a secret five-day trip to try to find the people behind the bombing.

Fortunately, there is only one suspect, "Abu Hamza" (not the real Abu Hamza, currently residing in a British prison).

The Americans' most reliable ally is a Saudi colonel (Ashraf Barhom).

He resents the visitors muscling in on his territory, but recognises that they have a more sophisticated approach to forensics and questioning.

The Saudis' modus operandi appears to be the Portuguese model, of trampling all over the crime scene, tormenting innocent people and letting the real culprits go free.

For a time, the movie seems to be developing into an FBI procedural, with the Saudi colonel warming to the Americans' superior know-how; but in the final 30 minutes, the movie forgets such subtleties.

The bad guys obligingly lead the good guys back to their headquarters, where there ensues a good old-fashioned shoot-out.

There is a lot of U.S. wish-fulfilment in this shoot-'em-up revenge movie, and then a bewildering afterthought which seems to be a sop to liberals: a curiously offensive attempt to bleat about the futility of revenge, which even implies some moral equivalence between fanatical terrorists massacring innocent civilians and Americans dishing out lethal justice to murderers.

As long as you don't think about the film too deeply, actor-turned-director Peter Berg has fashioned a fast-moving, reasonably gripping, Rambo-style action thriller.

The characters are so thin, they are a waste of Chris Cooper and Jamie Foxx.

But the fact that the most nuanced performance is given by Ashraf Barhom helps take the curse off the prevailing gungho Americanism.

Syriana had more pretensions to telling the 'truth' about the Middle East, but The Kingdom is the more entertaining picture.

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