The Kingdom

The Kingdom follows a ragtag group of FBI agents – including Jamie Foxx’s Ronald Fleury, Chris Cooper’s Grant Sykes, and Jason Bateman’s Adam Leavitt – as they surreptitiously arrive in Saudi Arabia to solve a terrorist act against American soldiers, with the bulk of the movie essentially playing out like an overlong and overwrought episode of CSI. There’s exceedingly little within The Kingdom that’s been designed to capture (and hold) the viewer’s interest, as director Peter Berg and screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan consistently place the emphasis on the agents’ increasingly banal investigation. And because the film’s various characters are left undeveloped beyond their most superficial attributes – ie Foxx’s Fleury is the gruff leader, Bateman’s Leavitt is the wacky sidekick, etc – it’s virtually impossible to care about their efforts at solving the crime (and it’s even more difficult to muster up any concern for their well-being once things start to get dangerous). Such problems are exacerbated by Berg’s uniformly questionable directorial choices, with his relentless and thoroughly distracting use of shaky camerawork easily the film’s most egregious failing (but the needlessly overlapping dialogue comes in at a close second, however). The inclusion of a relatively thrilling third-act action sequence isn’t quite strong enough to excuse the ineffectiveness of everything that’s come before it, and there’s little doubt that The Kingdom ultimately comes off as nothing less than a total misfire.

** out of ****