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 marklunn rated 13 months ago - From the page: "Memo to Hollywood: We%u2019re not this stupid
Thriller Kingdom is racist trash
By CHRISTOPHER KELLY Fort Worth Star-Telegram
FILM REVIEW:
The Kingdom
Starring: Jamie Foxx, Chris Cooper, Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman
Director: Peter Berg
Writer: Matthew Michael Ca...
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1 Reviews
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- marklunn rated 13 months ago
- From the page: "Memo to Hollywood: We%u2019re not this stupid
Thriller Kingdom is racist trash
By CHRISTOPHER KELLY Fort Worth Star-Telegram
FILM REVIEW:
The Kingdom
Starring: Jamie Foxx, Chris Cooper, Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman
Director: Peter Berg
Writer: Matthew Michael Carnahan
Running time: 111 minutes
Classified: 18A
* out of four
Imagine the high-minded sanctimony of Stephen Gaghan%u2019s Syriana combined with the cheesy pyrotechnics of your average Jerry Bruckheimer blow-em-up, and you%u2019ll begin to get a sense of The Kingdom, a big, loud, dumb Hollywood thriller trying to pass itself off as a "thought-provoking" treatise on the turmoil in the Middle East.
The film is directed by Peter Berg in much the same manner as the TV version of his Friday Night Lights %u2014 which means the camera jerks around furiously and the actors all look inconsolably solemn. Berg never lets you forget that you%u2019re supposed to take his work very, very seriously.
But beneath all the bluster and artifice, The Kingdom is just hokum, a prolonged chase across a desert that lurches from one bald-faced contrivance to the next. It%u2019s the worst sort of trash %u2014 the utterly joyless kind.
Jamie Foxx stars as Special Agent Ronald Fleury, the head of a team of FBI agents who travel to Saudi Arabia to investigate a suicide bombing that%u2019s taken place inside the highly guarded walls of an American housing facility. Except before Fleury and his team can even get there, we must endure nearly 30 minutes of secret meetings and cryptic negotiations, since neither the Saudis nor the State Department want the FBI involved.
As in Syriana, the scenes unfold at a rapid-fire clip, with new characters disappearing off the screen almost as quickly as they%u2019re introduced. You can barely follow the action, and the filmmakers prefer it that way: The vagueness and elusiveness of the screenplay (by Matthew Michael Carnahan) masks the fact that the movie doesn%u2019t have a single original idea.
Once in Saudi Arabia, Fleury and his cohorts Grant Sykes (Chris Cooper), Janet Mayes (Jennifer Garner) and Adam Leavitt (Jason Bateman) roll up their sleeves and begin their investigation. The Saudis initially refuse to provide the group the access they need, but our wily Americans power ahead nevertheless. This middle section of the film is a long, boring procedural. The scenes unfold so quickly that we can barely register the evidence as it%u2019s being collected; and the bad guys are so fuzzily identified that we have no stake in seeing how they%u2019re captured.
You%u2019d think a movie featuring so many likable actors would at least be able to give us someone to root for. Instead, the characters here are all thuddingly obvious types: Foxx the earnest family man; Cooper is the world-weary veteran; Garner is the tightly wound woman trying to prove herself in an alpha male%u2019s world; and Bateman is the jokey clown. Berg also seems to have instructed the actors to wear anguished expressions and speak in preternaturally solemn voices, as if they%u2019ve stumbled onto the set of a Strindberg play %u2014 even Bateman, who%u2019s supposed to be the comic relief, looks like someone just killed his cat. (All four of the leads, however, fare better than Jeremy Piven, who turns up in a bad salt-and-pepper hairpiece as a frantic State Department official who behaves just like Piven%u2019s Ari Gold character on Entourage.)
The Kingdom just turns louder and dumber as it goes along, especially once the sets begin exploding with abandon in the third act. Except no amount of pyrotechnics can obscure this movie%u2019s racist core. The Saudis in the movie fall into two distinct camps: the oil-rich royalty who condescend to Americans and the disenfranchised terrorists, who are looking for any opportunity they can find to slaughter Americans. (There%u2019s also a third category: the clueless Saudis who help in the investigation, who are apparently too stupid to know that you use a pump to remove water from a hall %u2014 though this group gets thankfully little screen time.) Most grating of all is the character of Sgt. Haytham (Ali Suliman), the initially wary but fundamentally decent Saudi who agrees to help the Americans. The character might as well be named Token Nice Arab %u2014 and the moment he appears on the screen, you start counting the minutes until he%u2019s going to be tragically murdered.
Is this what we%u2019re in for now that Hollywood has turned its attention to the problems of the Middle East? The Kingdom follows right on the heels of In the Valley of Elah, which used the tragedies of the Iraq War as a soapbox for a screed against the Bush administration. That movie%u2019s liberal naivete, however, is vastly preferable to The Kingdom, which exploits Americans%u2019 fears about terrorism for the purpose of some cheap popcorn-munching thrills.
And The Kingdom doesn%u2019t even h
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