Review: The Kingdom (2007)

The Kingdom

The Kingdom isn’t a bad film, but it is rather inconsequential. Its problems lie mostly in not delivering on the first two acts’ development and its mysteriously apolitical nature, despite being bookended by brief attempts to forcefully make the audience think. Both problems intersect and produce a film that really doesn’t have much to say.

Firstly, the development problems. The first two acts are designed around getting the FBI team into Saudi Arabia in order to conduct a crime scene investigation of the mass murder, and then the investigation itself. No problems there. Unfortunately, it doesn’t pay off. The investigation ultimately leads to a raid on a few lowest-of-the-lower-level terrorists. All forward momentum is lost until the team is ambushed on the highway while returning to home base, and events proceed from here to lead the team to the terrorist leader they suspected to be responsible. There’s nothing fulfilling about the team stumbling blindly into solving the case. Actually, it’s not so much solved as rectified, what with every single terrorist on hand left dead by the film’s end and no evidence available, to the characters at least, to conclusively pin the murders on those the team kill.

In tandem with this is the first two acts’ emphasis on the American and Saudi governments’ respective tight leashes on the FBI team. They’re limited in how they can collect evidence, talk to witnesses, examine corpses and especially where, when and with who they can travel. So when the team makes an unexpected trip following the ambush into the heart of Riyadh, fully armed and accompanied by two Saudi officers clearly no longer operating under any official guidance, and kill what had to have been a good two dozen Saudi terrorists, it’s utterly surprising when not a peep is mentioned about the excursion’s geopolitical ramifications. It’s not mentioned during the start of the third act’s pursuit by the Saudi soldiers who had previously been in charge of holding the aforementioned leash, nor is it mentioned by anyone else during the film’s final moments. When a movie starts by having characters repeatedly declare that any American investigative team landing in Saudi Arabia would in and of itself be upsetting to the nations’ relations finishes with an entirely unauthorized and explosive incursion into civilian territory without blinking, well, the movie’s given up any semblance of being grounded in reality, or even following its own internal logic.

You have to wonder why the first two acts exist when they’re almost completely thrown out the window for the finale.

The opening credits sequence provides an illustrated briefing of US-Saudi relations dating back to the 1930s. One expects these relations to be tested on macro and/or micro levels, but it’s a failed promise. The background info is interesting but hardly necessary to the following experience. Perhaps some of this would have been capitalized upon had the third act not forgotten what came before it, but alas. It all boils down to a well made if mindless action thriller. To be fair, the last sequence does attempt to inspire conversation as audiences depart the theater, but I’m not sure what it raises is really explored at all in the film, making it something of a throwaway moment hoping to earn the film credit for things it didn’t do. Suffice to say, it raises a comparison between the film’s terrorists and the FBI team (or perhaps more broadly, Americans) and their approach to the global conflict. It’s a decent starter conversation piece, and very pointed, but as presented probably too reductive given the topic. It may end up inspiring more knee-jerk reactions than consideration.

All said and done, The Kingdom isn’t so much offensive as inoffensive. The last thirty to forty minutes are gripping and include some real crowd-pleasing moments along with my favorite shot of the film: the view from an SUV traveling through an explosion, the screen is filled with roiling reds while speckled with black chunks of debris.