Review of The Kingdom (2007) by Imgonnaget S — 10 Feb 2010

If you can get past the muddled politics and some conventional storytelling tactics the Kingdom is a film that packs some huge punches. The opening scene is as riveting as anything I've ever seen. The ending gun-fight is just a riveting if occasionally implausible. The acting is solid throughout with Jason Bateman showing a more serious side to his persona and Jamie Foxx as the lead bad-ass, even though his character's rather cliche lines do get on my nerves. Peter Berg does a competent job directing, implementing the overused but still effective hand held camera approach. My favorite moment is at the very end though, after the dust has settled; the last scene raises the film to a level of poignancy it didn't touch during the preceding hour and forty five minutes.

Perhaps my biggest concern with the film was the absurd fictional "setting" placed among the all-too-real modern day Iran. The hyper-intense violence and subject matter is at times too visceral and hard-hitting to be straddling the line of fiction and reality. I wondered if the set-up was a ploy to not only portray the action and violence that carries the film but to also hold ground to heavy-handed if not too controversial political discussion. The whole film seems like a "middle of the road" exploitation of these subject matters, at times seemingly done with a childlike sense of carelessness. A film without an unbiased opinion cannot afford to be "middle of the road" because it will alienate the chance of people taking it seriously.

However this is the feeling I got only at certain moments watching the film. At other times, like the ending, I felt differently about it. The result is an unusual combination of feelings. This is not Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen where the army trapezes around the middle east blowing shit up, but it's also not Hurt Locker or Paradise Lost, films which handle their subject matter with great skill and humbleness. It is a serious film with identity issues, but it still packs it's fair share of visceral thrills and emotional scenes.