Losing Battle

Peter Berg's action-packed Kingdom misfires.

by Shaun Brady

CAR TROUBLE: Jennifer Garner dodges bullets and bad guys. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Peter Berg has been loudly trumpeting his contention that the head-crunching action movie trappings of The Kingdom are merely the spoonful of sugar that makes the geopolitical medicine go down. But after a few too many frantic shots of Jamie Foxx dodging shoulder-fired missiles, you may find yourself gagging at the sickly sweetness and wishing the meds would kick in a bit sooner.

Kicking off with a CliffsNotes history of Saudi Arabia under the opening credits, Berg's film clearly wants to clarify the confusion of Middle Eastern friends and enemies that makes the so-called War on Terror such a jingoistic muddle. But Matthew Michael Carnahan's script errs on the side of oversimplifying, delineating good guys from bad guys, so that there's never any question that the guy who Jennifer Garner stabs in the crotch really deserves it.

The first misstep comes in the explosive acts that set the plot in motion, a series of terrorist bombings at an American oil facility in Riyadh. You'd think the sheer horror of that act — which takes the lives of several children, as we're jaw-clenchingly reminded on several occasions — would be enough to set the resolve of Foxx and his crew of gung-ho FBI investigators. Instead, Carnahan insists on going the "this-time-it's-personal" route, offing a friend of the group, granting them a stake in overcoming the political hurdles to their investigating the attacks firsthand.

Of course, if there's anything that sensitive political observers hate more than maverick secret agents, it's kowtowing politicians, so Foxx and co. get a free pass on their lone-wolf tactics once the sleazy State Department lackeys start toadying to the Saudi royals and nix the excursion. They only run into more bureaucracy once on the ground, limited in their investigation and shackled to Saudi Col. Faris Al Ghazi, their local baby sitter. But this is an open-minded film, and Al Ghazi is a "Good Muslim" who sees the import of the Americans' necessarily important mission and pulls whatever strings he can to help.

But where there's a Good Muslim there must be Bad Muslims, and before long we're treated to a parade of cruel interrogators, digitless bomb-makers and, worst of all, men offended by Garner's plucky, unveiled presence. Al Ghazi blanches appropriately at the backwardness of his countrymen, while Foxx's company — rounded out by the scene-stealing Chris Cooper and comic relief Jason Bateman — condescendingly smirk their way around the savages.

All the CSI digging through wreckage and examining of corpses gradually gives way to whiz-bang shoot-outs. Berg, who managed to balance bone-jarring action with vivid characters so well in Friday Night Lights, here smash-cuts the action with color-drained grit, seeming to emulate producer Michael Mann — minus Mann's sensual urgency.

It all feels too rote and near-Rambo in its simplistic portrait of a foreign policy disaster as easily remedied with a few well-placed brutal killings. Berg belatedly tips his hat to the complexity of the situation with an evocation of the endless cycle of violence in the film's closing moments, but it rings false; if the real-life evildoers were as easily uncovered and disposed of as The Kingdom makes them out to be, we wouldn't have fucked up badly enough to necessitate films like this.

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

The Kingdom

Directed by Peter Berg

A Universal Pictures release