The Kingdom

The Kingdom is the title of the newest Peter Berg movie. My favourite movie by him is Very bad things, a superb story, with very black humour starring Cameron Diaz and Christian Slater.

Sadly, his newest movie does not satisfy the expectations I had.

It starts very well, rounding up the fact in the initial five minutes. Saudi Arabia, the biggest oil producing country with an extremely fundamental Islam is the worlds largest supporter of terrorist organisations. Osama bin Ladin is Saudi, 14 out of the 19 911 attackers were Saudi and without the financial and personal support of Saudis, most Muslim terrorist organisations would crumble.

On the other hand, the Saudi Arabia need the US to protect them even though Saudi Arabia is the biggest buyer of US arms. Probably Israel receives more, but Saudi Arabia at least pays for them.

There are no operational US military forces in SA since 2003 and the movie was produced in Abu Dhabi. The situation is very difficult. There are a lot of foreign workers in SA, the Westerners live in protected communities, separated by the SA public. The dirty work is done mostly by Philippians or workers who come from other Muslim countries. There are a lot of reports about mistreatments of foreigners, just these day a Swiss-French boy was raped by three Saudis.

The movie is about an attack of Saudi terrorists on a ‘protected community’ where US workers for oil companies live with their families. As there are a lot of casualties, the FBI sends in a group of four people to support the Saudi investigations.

As so often in these movies, we have Jamie Fox as the young leader of the group, Jennifer Garner bringing her boobies. At least, Peter Berg resists of trying to add a love scene between his two stars. Being an American movie, I had expected that. On the other hand, she could have at least dressed better not displaying her breasts in SA. Not that you see any skin, if she were a professional FBI-agent, she would have dressed more decent in SA, I think.

An other thing about Jamie Fox. I like him as an actor. But now, his teeth are just unnaturally white and his hair is always perfect. Sorry, I just can’t take him serious as an FBI-agent, when he looks too much like an actor. Hardly ever gets dirty.

The other two agents are believable. But do not play a major role in the movie.

There are some Saudi, who don’t want any US citizens on their ‘holy’ ground (besides the terrorists). The Saudi police force is shown as being incompetent, even stupid and mostly unsupporting of the ongoing investigation.

There is ‘of course’ a good Saudi police officer who helps, without spoiling too much of the movie, to take down the terrorist group.

In the end, all the bad guys are dead, their children and grandchildren swearing revenge and the good guys fly back home.

Why can’t I give this movie more than four out of ten points? There is not too much acting going on, Jennifer Garner and Ashraf Barhom stand out (a bit). The story would have a lot of potential and the topic is extremely interesting, Michael Moore should do a movie about it. But after the before mentioned five minutes, the story has done it’s duty and is replaced by action. I am not an enemy of action, but a good movie needs a good story and after the five minutes and the trailer, I had expected more information and some hints towards a solution.