Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #463 in DVD
• Released on: 2008-01-28
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Format: PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 106 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
Set in Saudi Arabia, The Kingdom is a political action thriller with good acting and wonderful visuals. Its so-so script, though, at times meanders aimlessly until a good explosion jolts the viewer's attention back to the screen. Jamie Foxx stars as FBI special agent Ronald Fleury, who leads an elite team into Saudi Arabia to find the terrorists who attacked American employees working in the Middle East. He has been given the unlikely deadline of five days to infiltrate the compound, with just his wit and his crew, which includes forensics expert Janet Mayes (Jennifer Garner), explosives guru Grant Sykes (Chris Cooper), and intelligence analyst Adam Leavitt (Jason Bateman). It's unclear how helpful smarmy U.S. diplomat Damon Schmidt (Jeremy Piven) will be, but Fleury knows enough to surmise that the media-hungry Schmidt might not be completely trustworthy. Foxx and Garner have wonderful screen presence, but it's Bateman and Piven who get the best lines. Director Peter Berg peppers The Kingdom with actors he has worked with in the past. Berg, who guest-starred on Alias opposite Garner, casts Tim McGraw in a small role here. (The country singer also had a co-starring role in Berg's 2004 film Friday Night Lights.) And Kyle Chandler and Minka Kelly--two of Berg's lead actors from the Friday Night Lights television series, , make appearances in The Kingdom. The action sequences he creates are impressive and generate a sense of panic that The Kingdom producer Michael Mann (Miami Vice) undoubtedly applauds. While a tauter script would've rounded out the action nicely, the action in many cases does speak for itself. --Jae-Ha Kim

Synopsis
Actor, writer, and director Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights) delivers a fearless, action-packed political thriller with The Kingdom. Shot in the Middle East with unsettling immediacy, the hand-held cameras put viewers right inside the action, while the tension between American FBI agents and their Saudi counterparts maintains an interesting uncertainty about who's 'right' and who's 'wrong'. The bad guys, however, are unmistakable: the film opens with a brutal terrorist attack on an oil company compound in Saudi Arabia, where a visiting FBI agent is killed. Back home in Washington, fellow agents Ronald Fleury (Jamie Foxx, Ray) and Janet Mayes (Jennifer Garner, Alias) want revenge, and will do whatever it takes to gain access to the investigation. Fleury all but blackmails a Saudi prince to get clearance against the wishes of a timorous attorney general, and flies overnight to the scene of the crime. Accompanying him are the no-nonsense forensics expert Mayes, Southern-fried bomb authority Grant Sykes (Chris Cooper, Adaptation), and smart aleck Adam Leavitt (Jason Bateman, Arrested Development). Once there, they encounter the resistance of a Saudi government more interested in getting the Americans safely out of the country and avoiding conflict, rather than in solving the crime. They are assigned a smarmy handler with a weak stomach (Jeremy Piven, Entourage) to make sure they stay out of trouble. The team must navigate a maze of bureaucracy to begin collecting evidence, but they have an unlikely ally in their Saudi escort, Colonel Faris Al Ghazi (Ashraf Barhom, Paradise Now), a scrupulous and intelligent officer whom Fleury befriends. Soon enough, procedure and protocol give way to car chases and explosive fire fights, and the bleak political climate of extremism and violence is portrayed in a stark light with no easy answers.

Customer Reviews

out of the ordinary
This is a really strong action movie that addresses terrorism from another angle and I really found this a pleasant surprise. I am not sure the final scene is something that could really happen, and maybe you can argue that the FBI has too much of a "hero saving the day" role, but it did hold me stuck in front of the screen. This is fiction, and it does deliver a very good time.

Kingdom
I thought this was a really good movie. Always nice to see a bit of asskickery going on, and this movie really delivers. However it also shows a more human side with the introduction of Colonel Al Ghazi and his story. Jamie Foxx (Stealth, Ray) gives an impressive performance alongside Jennifer Garner(Alias, Daredevil) Jason Bateman (Hancock, Arrested Development) and Chris Cooper (Jarhead, The Patriot). I would recommend this one for the guys and gals.

Awful
Worst film I have seen this year. What on earth is Jamie Foxx doing in this mindless pile of rubbish?

The film opens with this 2 minute potted history of Saudi Arabia -with lots of flashing images and snippets of newsreel. Basically the upshot of this is that there is oil in Saudi Arabia. The fact the filmakers believe this important information gives you an idea of the core audience - i.e. idiots. Whenever a new character enters the screen, they either introduce themselves by name and by job title, or it appears for them on the screen. Just to stop you getting anxious that you might need to use your brain.

Then the film cuts to a terrorist attack on an American oil workers compound in Saudi Arabia. The attack takes place on a family and friends softball game, just to make sure that you do get angry and yell at the TV that someone better be taking the fight to those commu-nazis - I mean, terrorists. Just to make sure you know the terrorists are bad, you see one making a child watch it all happen, and another dress up as a policeman, pretend to re-assure the Americans before blowing himself up among them.

Fortunately, someone is taking the fight to the commu-nazies, and this is Jamie Foxx and his elite team of FBI investigators get sent out to Saudi Arabia. They realize early on in the film that Saudi's are only good at being brutal, incapable of police work, or being terrorists.

The film makes some amazingly lame attempts to draw attention to the cultural differences between America and Saudi Arabia. In one scene, Jeniffer Garner's character touches a dead Muslim man when doing an autopsy. Bear in mind that her character is meant to be some sort of expert in Middle East terrorism. This is meant for the viewers benefit - the filmakers assuming that its target audience won't even be aware there are such things as cultural differences, so we end up with a ridiculous scene in which a middle-east expert doesn't know even small basics about Islamic culture. The film's idea of political complexity is to have someone introduced from the American embassy telling the FBI agents not to get killed and to go home ASAP. And towards the end of the film this official gets his way - but not before the terrorists launch an attack on the FBI agents by attacking their convoy on the way to the airport. Then in a daring chase, the FBI agents walk into two terrorist hideouts, killing hundreds of terrorists like so many levels of the computer game Medal Of Honour.

After bursting into an apartment and blowing half a family away, Jennifer Garner's character offers a traumatized hid a lollipop. This tells you right here everything you need to know about the people who make this film, that the family would be in some way grateful that the Americans made the bad men go away. Commando is a more complicated film. In fact, do you remember the start of Commando, when you see Arnie stroking a lovely baby deer with his daughter? That's the lollipop scene. Commando is charmingly amateurish, seemingly written by a hyperactive 14 year old. The Kingdom has aspirations to serious drama.

The Kingdom, and films like it, are the reason Team America: World Police was made.