The Kingdom (Widescreen Edition) dvd movie.|
The Kingdom (Widescreen Edition) buy bestselling dvd movies, videos find reviews, ratings, prices |
 |
List Price: $29.98 Our Price: $19.99 You Save: $9.99 Features • AC-3 • Color • Dolby • Dubbed • DVD-Video • Subtitled • Widescreen • NTSC In Theaters : 28 September, 2007 DVD Release : 26 December, 2007 |
| [ + Zoom ] [ Buy Now ] | DVD : Usually ships in 24 hours |
|
The Kingdom (Widescreen 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 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 |
|
|
| ♥♥♥♥♥ | not exactly Great Cinema, just lotsa FUN FUN FUN |
| 5 stars for pure entertainment value, 3 and 1/2 stars actual Artistic Quality.
What can I say, go into this one with low expectations as I did, and you should find it a great way to kill 2 hours. Yep there are some stock Hollywood cliches especially during the somewhat slowish first 1/3, but the fight scenes of the last 1/3 of the film makes it all worth it, despite their fairly egregious implausibility. So suspend your considerable disbelief, and just kick back and enjoy the freeway chase, the neighborhood shootout and the apartment shootout especially the part featuring World Class Hot Babe Jennifer Garner putting a four inch blade into the back of some big burly A-rab's jihadi skull after he throws her around the room like a bag 'o potatoes. Along the way, there are some vague jabs at insight: we see that the Washington DC political establishment is very much in cahoots with the Saudi royals and that the Saudi royals are an equally dubious bunch; that the American diplomatic corps has no shortage of greasy careerist slimeballs; that the average American and the average Saudi both view each other's governments and cultures with comparable amounts of distrust and xenophobia, probably well-deserved; that both countries are in bed with each other for the same bottom-line economic and military conveniences, etc. All quite reasonable and salient points no doubt, hardly original of course---but as one noted film critic pointed out, this is sort of like the "...For Dummies" version of "Syriana." In other words, the geopolitical backdrop is just a cool frame for all the state of the art bang-boom-bam boilerplate. It's just loads of fun to watch the explosions and blood-splattering...I could watch the luscious Jennifer Garner running around in a snug and sweaty T-shirt with an automatic rifle in her hands dodging RPGs all day long! With the exception of Chris Cooper and the two lead Saudi guys (Ali Suliman and Ashraf Barhom), none of these guys are first-rate actors...but that's ok, director Peter Berg is smart enough to mostly spare them any overly challenging thespian moments, with lots of cutaways and jump cuts and cool music and visual atmospherics to keep us entertained. The script has an admirably low number of clunkers for an action movie, too---not exactly Ingmar Bergman, but very few schmaltzy cringe-inducing moments, even at the end. Don't know where this film was shot, but it does an excellent job of conjuring up the sights and sounds of Saudi Arabia which is a fascinating planet all unto itself. |
|
|