Movie Review: The Kingdom

Rating: *** 1/2 /5 (Watch it!)

Unlike most people, I never planned to watch this movie, nor was I even remotely interested in it. One of my friends kept showing me trailer after trailer of this movie in the hopes of trying to kindle some sort of interest, but all I saw were tons of explosions, and tons of people dying. I didn't think that would be the sort of thing that I would like to spend 2 hours watching, so I gave him a very big "MEH".

The movie is about a terrorist attack on Americans in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killing over a hundred people. The FBI is unable to send agents to investigate due to diplomatic relations. However, Special Agent Fleury (Jamie Foxx) and his team (Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman, and Chris Cooper) decide to take matters into their own hands and find a way to get into Saudi Arabia to investigate, and find the terrorist leader.

Perhaps the greatest part of the whole movie was the opening sequence that details the United States' turbulent history with Saudi Arabia. Not only is it a nice summary, but the montage and the way they were shown is awesome. The rest of the movie is an action movie with bits of politics sprinkled in now and then to make it seem more realistic.

I've never really been a big action fan, although I've seen my fair share, and loved them. This movie pushes it quite a bit, but there is a good reason for it, which I'll mention a little later. The political side of this movie, for the most part, seem like an after-thought. It was as if the writers were trying to figure out how to send only a small team of FBI agents to Saudi Arabia, instead of the whole crew. Then one of them goes, "Aha! Politics! Let's have some guy totally against it, and that's it!" And that's exactly what happened in the movie. The Attorney General didn't want it, so case closed. And they try to sprinkle bits and pieces of political machinations by those people, which didn't have much meaning to the main plot of the movie. To top it off, there didn't seem to be much consequence for the "rogue" FBI agents. Then again, since they're the heroes of the story, I guess the politicians can disregard their actions.

One of the good things about this movie is that it gives us a glimpse of Saudi Arabia, a locale very different from the New York's and LA's of most American movies. The downside is that Americans are still the heroes. They depict the Arabian investigators as harsh, cruel, and unrelenting in their investigations, but in the end, entirely wrong. They didn't even know enough to preserve evidence. Then the Americans come along and suddenly find evidence after evidence that the Arabians supposedly missed. Boy, those Americans sure are the smartest people in the world! What did we expect from a Pro-American movie, right? Although, I guess they didn't really insult the Arabians much, as they still gave them a hero to look up to in al'Ghazi, who only helped in killing.

That aside, this movie did have some memorable lines as Damon Schmidt's, "Can we dial down the boobies?" But the best line of the movie comes at the end, "I said we were going to kill them all." Both sides say the same thing, and it is this line that defines the whole movie, and justifies the past 2 hours. If they had said it at the beginning of the movie, I would tell people to leave after that, because everything else was just filler. This line is the meat of the movie, and for those steering clear of social and moral commentary, you may stop reading now.

It seems that in this day and age, revenge is considered to be the normal social practice. If someone does something to me, I have every right to do something back to them. They killed my loved one, I have to kill them back. And if I do, I'm the hero. We can see it especially in the movies, but also in the news. Everyday, people are doing to others what they do unto them. To me, this is a sign of the moral bankruptcy that most of society toady live in. Their morality is not based on... well, God, but instead it's based on their own opinions. I think it's right, so it is. Because of this, each person has his own morality, which others must conform to. Since we know this isn't possible, then we get into a lot of situations where people get into disagreements.