Film Clips	The Kingdom by M. Faust

Hollywood has been in an awfully vengeful mood lately. In the last month they’ve already given us Kevin Bacon and Jodie Foster as 1970s-style vigilantes in Death Sentence and The Brave One. The Kingdom isn’t exactly from that template, but it more directly depicts the cause of the American anxiety these movies are exploiting—the murderous activities of terrorists in the Middle East. Set in Saudi Arabia, The Kingdom opens with a sequence in which dozens of employees of an American oil company are slaughtered in their enclave—while playing softball, no less—in a terrorist bombing. Of course, the Saudi rulers would prefer to cover up all of this rather than expose the growing number of such activities in their own domain. (Bad for business, y’know.) What they weren’t counting on was that one of the victims was the best friend of FBI agent Jamie Foxx, who tears himself away from quality time with his son to lead an ace investigatory team to Riyadh. As archetypal as the inhabitants of any given foxhole in any given WWII movie, these include tough chick Jennifer Garner, wisecracking Jason Bateman and sagaciously drawling Chris Cooper. The fact that the US government doesn’t want them there stirring things up gives them no more pause than does the uncooperativeness of the Saudi army. In a style that was more appropriate in his jock epic Friday Night Lights, director Peter Berg shoots everything with handheld cameras that do less to impart a feeling of immediacy than of confusion. Not that it matters—despite the presence of a sympathetic Saudi cop (Ashraf Barhom) and some unearned attempts at humanitarian ambiguity in the final reel, this is an action movie unpersuasively disguised as a political thriller, suggesting that even the most innocent looking citizens are as likely as not to be bomb-wielding terrorists. But then, what can you expect from a movie that credits “Kissinger Associates” among its advisors?