The Kingdom
Studio: Universal
Rated: R
Cast: Jamie Foxx, Chris Cooper
Director: Peter Berg
WorkNameSort: Kingdom, The
Our Rating: 1.00
There’s an exchange between Jamie Foxx’s FBI agent and Ashraf Barhom’s Saudi colonel that is emblematic of this film’s biggest misstep. Having been forced to collaborate on finding a terrorist cell following a horrific attack on an American facility in Saudi Arabia, the unlikely friends start to bond over the old Incredible Hulk TV shows, which Col. al-Ghazi professes to enjoy. The pop-culture shit-shooting (literally, you’ll see) turns to Steve Austin, another favorite of the colonel’s. Foxx’s agent Fleury responds with “Yeah, The Six Million Dollar Man, that’s my shit!” To which the colonel responds: “Oh, you need bathroom?” It’s the kind of culture-clash joke you’d expect to find in an offensive reality show about a jive-talking American and a clueless Saudi forced to shack up together, not an ostensibly serious movie about our terror-threatened global climate. It’s hardly an isolated joke, either; The Kingdom is littered with so many cheap comic asides, I half-expected to hear a laugh track through the entire second act The film’s humor is even more loathsome for flying in the face of the movie’s opening. A dizzying title montage provides a history lesson on the confluence of Saudi Arabia’s desire for power with America’s desire for oil, contextualizing Sept. 11 in a broad, almost conspiratorial setting and using documentary footage to make its point. By doing so, the film promises profundity and relevance; instead, it delivers shallow stunts and insulting dialogue. In defiance of their government, four rogue FBI agents (Foxx, Chris Cooper, Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman) travel to Saudi Arabia to catch the instigators of the calculated bombing of a softball field populated by Americans. They plunge into Saudi Arabia with no knowledge whatsoever of the country’s customs, culture, people or history. The Kingdom doesn’t think much of its audience; it’s one of those movies that shows flashbacks of things that happened 30 minutes earlier, in case we forgot. It retains its patronizing tone for the drama as well as the comedy. The whole cast of stellar actors is a letdown, but none is worse than Foxx, a walking testosterone injection who stepped right off the set of Miami Vice and onto this on. That this Oscar winner plays his part with the kind of brutish gracelessness that went out with Steven Seagal is consistent with a movie whose every potential for quality is promptly shot down, one hand-held flash-cut after another.
This article appears in Sep 26 – Oct 2, 2007.