The Kingdom (Full Screen Edition) dvd movie.|
The Kingdom (Full Screen Edition) cheap dvd videos, dvd movies for sale |
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List Price: $29.98 Our Price: $20.49 You Save: $9.49 Features • AC-3 • Color • Dolby • Dubbed • DVD-Video • Full Screen • Subtitled • NTSC In Theaters : 28 September, 2007 DVD Release : 26 December, 2007 |
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The Kingdom (Full Screen Edition) description 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 ... review details |
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| ♥♥♥♥♥ | A lot of smoke, not much fire |
| Visceral as it may be, Peter Berg's "The Kingdom" employs an absurd premise: That a terrorist attack on American oil workers in Saudi Arabia would allow for a character-driven, small-ensemble hunt for the ringleader to ensue in the midst of crowded markets and impromptu prayer sessions.
Hogwash; such a thing would trigger a Saudi lock down so swift and fierce that said investigation would play out amidst deserted streets and silence. The remaining American workers and their families would be whisked "out country" in hours. A grieving Tim McGraw, stumbling around in a base house near the bomb site two days after the deed? Please. It'd be easier to suspend belief if Berg and screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan weren't so intent on imposing the facts of the US-Saudi relationship - true, but obvious and meant to impress - in the movie's opening credits. Or using title placards to identify characters, documentary-style. Or fixating on the supposed efficiency and forensic genius of an elite four-person FBI team, led by Jamie Foxx, who basically wears shades, growls and plays cool until the half-hour gun battle right out of Michael Mann's playbook. A grainy film stock can't obscure a rudderless police procedural in which the bad guys finally intervene on behalf of the good ones so the movie can end in a rush of blood. Foxx is Ronald Fleury, an FBI investigator whose team of snoops includes grizzled Grant Sykes (Chris Cooper), a token, braver-than-thou female in Janet Mayes (Jennifer Garner) and, yeah, comic relief in Adam Leavitt (Jason Bateman). Levity? Get it? Nebbish whining from a geek in the wake of a terrorist attack? Tastes like dry Strawberry Quik, especially when the geek becomes distressed damsel, and is saved twice from a beheading. Once by a faulty camera tripod. You cannot imagine a more unlikely foursome. Fortunately, Carnahan's script provides a Saudi cop (Ashraf Barhom from "Paradise Now") whose "rules" forbid the FBI from doing much. "The Kingdom" has an interminable second act in which Fleury's gang seeks the identity of someone the audience has already met, through means that will not get them particularly close. Indeed, the team seems to fall short, until a bit of serendipitous violence - it can't be called anything else - drags our intrepids straight to the rocket-infested lair. What's left? A meandering travelogue? "The Kingdom" knows some things about Saudi Arabia, and even has the sense to compare and contrast cultures, but it underlines these critiques in a preening, know-it-all way that Berg brings to his work. Berg's camera flits about the chaos before zeroing in, over and over, for that just-so line of poignancy - only he does it with varying shot widths, which, in its own way, is just as ridiculous as all those slap-dash, get-a-car-crash-from-12 angles films in the 1980s. Berg's mentor, Mann, falls into that trap occasionally - see "Ali" - but not like this. And the less said about the coda of "The Kingdom," the better. Enough to say that it's as self-conscious and a little bit sickening. Check out Berg's barely perceptible zoom on the movie's final image. Arrogant much? |
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