Well here’s a film that’s not likely to get shown in Saudi Arabia – The Kingdom of the title.
The Kingdom is the first of a series of films set in a post 9/11 world with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan fairly bogged down.
It begins with a skilfully edited credit sequence that uses smart graphics and archive footage to tell a potted history of the United States’ involvement with oil in Saudi Arabia following its unification in 1932. It runs right through to the identification of 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers being Saudi.
The film proper begins with life in a Western compound being savagely interrupted by a series of murders and explosions that kills over a hundred. Then we meet a small and elite FBI team run by Jamie Foxx with Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman and Chris Cooper, who all want to travel to the kingdom and investigate the attack on the ground. But it’s politically sensitive, and they’re warned off.
Foxx doesn’t take no for an answer and soon they’re on the ground, and trying to work with a Saudi government who’s suspicious of them and doesn’t necessarily want to help either. There are one or two good guys, but effectively it’s an uphill battle, not helped by Jeremy Piven’s US government official locally based.
The politics of the piece are quite interesting, with an explicit understanding made that the only reason the US is involved is because of oil, yet the whole of Saudi Arabia is made to feel incredibly dangerous.
Whenever the characters are out and about, the close-cut camera work is constantly finding suspicious cars and people for our eyes to fall on. Could any one of these contain a bomb or harbour attackers? The Steadicam-free handheld camera work makes us feel more uncertain. You never quite know what’s around the corner. While it’s not quite of the same calibre as Greengrass’s, it all adds to the general unease.
The performances are superb, and although a couple of action sequences feel a little too “Hollywood”, it’s really well made. Ashraf Barhom and Ali Suliman are good as the two assisting Saudi police officers. There are couple of things that remind me of a John Sayles film – obviously the presence of Chris Cooper in the cast, but also Danny Huston’s Attorney General. Could Sayles have script doctored this film? Actually I note that writer Matthew Michael Carnahan is now working on the big screen remake of State of Play which possibly isn’t a bad thing.
And although the ending begins as being a little too twee, there’s a wonderful little coda, that makes you think about everything that’s gone before.
The only tiny thing I’d have changed is to rename the arch villain of the piece – he’s named Abu Hamza, the same as the infamous hook-handed cleric from the Finsbury Park mosque.
But well worth a viewing when this film opens in October.