nixsight

Only watched one movie this week:

The Kingdom

The Kingdom is one of those movies that seems to be ever-present on the shelves at the various stores in town, but that I’ve heard very little about, so it has managed to sneak it’s way into my consciousness quite stealthily. This probably isn’t much of a reassurance to the army of marketing people who design the campaign and place movies like this – it wasn’t until it was reduced to under a fiver that my curiosity got the better of me.

I think the thing that has always caught my eye is the Michael Mann-esque presentation of the piece – not too much of a surprise, because Mann is one of the producers. I could tell from the cover that it was going to be slickly produced. I just didn’t know much more about it. I have somehow managed to avoid seeing a single trailer for the thing, and the back-of-box blurb seemed so deliberately vague as to possibly suggest that this was going to as likely be about FBI agents quite bizarrely searching for a serial killer in the Middle East, as about anything else.

It’s possible that I don’t pay enough attention to back-of-box blurb, actually, but moving on…

I’ve developed a peculiar irritation for Jamie Foxx. I have no idea why this is – he has been superb in every film that I’ve seen him in, from his understated performance in “Collateral” to a solid performance as a massive jerk sportsman in the massively jerky sports movie “Any Given Sunday” (which I loved, by the way), to his more controlled performance in “Jarhead” – he’s a solid actor.

Not Denzel, but then, who is? Even Denzel isn’t sometimes…!

Actually, maybe I do know why it is. Maybe it’s his public persona. About which I know little, beyond that it allowed him, without irony, to collaborate with Kanye West on “Golddigger”. There’s a smugness which I attribute to him, which may not be fair.

The other reason I may have dodged this film is that, despite really liking Jennifer Garner, I have no idea why. Again, this probably isn’t really fair. I find her an engaging enough screen-presence – I buy her characters in “Alias” and “Daredevil” well enough, and she isn’t unattractive. And in “Juno”, she does a particularly good job of making you eventually feel sympathetic toward a particularly flawed woman.

But I guess so far, there either hasn’t been a role that has really showed that she can do anything other than the “understated and fairly in-control competent woman” that I’ve seen her play, or else she actually just isn’t up to playing them. She tends to be used as wallpaper in pretty cool projects, and unless she does something that shows that she can do something more – and no, I’m not going to seek out “13 Going On 30″ on the offchance that she can do funny, it’ll have to be something else – her presence on a cast-list will always make me feel a little ambivalent.

So okay, there are two reasons – aside from a lacklustre promotion job – why I might not have watched the film before.

I was a bit of an idiot, at it turns out. You hear me saying that a lot around here, don’t you?

The film notionally concerns itself with making a thought-provoking investigative thriller, with political undertones, set in Saudi Arabia. As with any other narrative that wants to be taken seriously set in the middle-east, it has a choice to make early on – either it makes an effort to explain the complex clusterfuck of concerns in the region – or it goes the character/alienation route of films like “Jarhead”, and concentrates on the experiences of individuals cut-off from the decisions and politics that permeate everything there.

Because a lot of the situations “The Kingdom” come directly from the sticky political and cultural climate there, in Saudi Arabia, the filmmakers had to go with the former option. How they did it was probably a triumph of presentation over complexity – I don’t know enough about the … world… to be sure – but it puts you in the right frame of mind from the off. The film starts out with a slickly animated timeline of the formation of Saudi Arabia, and what has happened since. It also explains the formation of American camps in “The Kingdom”, and that the FBI are notionally responsible for US citizens wherever in the world that they are.

I think.

To be honest, I was just so taken with how beautifully put together it was, with animation, film archives and sound editing working so well in unison, that I’m a little hazy on the actual details. It seemed to make sense at the time, is what’s important. Actually, that pretty much sets the tone for the whole movie.

After the brilliant introduction, the film proper with an atrocity – a pretty big one – and one of the most upsetting and shocking opening sequences I’ve seen in film plays out over around the first ten minutes.

I’m a firm believer in pacing in movies – that it can be a deal-breaker on a film. For example, “The Phantom Menace” at the cinema was manageable – actually enjoyable – at the cinema, solely because of the management of those beats. So it’s tough to be objective about “The Kingdom” without watching it again, because first time round, those two openers are easily enough to put you in the mood to be kind to this movie.

What follows is a well written, very well acted, and beautifully shot thriller, wherein Jamie Foxx, is an FBI agent heading a team who have an emotional investment in finding the terrorists responsible for the early carnage, and wrangle – against political pressure – a short period of time in Saudi Arabia to try and discover the culprits.

The script is a good friend to the actors – Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner do fair jobs with their agent roles, and Chris Cooper is, as always, dependable. Jamie Foxx does okay, too – although he is a little guilty of mumbling through parts of the first act, obscuring bits of dialogue. Generally, though, these are “CSI” team characters, with only a little bit of fleshing out done to them via banter between them. The real story – which they keep finding themselves come up against – is the political fragility of their position. They are frustrated to find themselves unable to investigate for the first part of their journey, Garner’s character finds herself constantly restricted by the Muslim state’s culture, and they have a police bodyguard who has a vested interest in keeping them so far out of harm’s way as to be in captivity.

In fact, here’s where the film’s real star comes out. As competent as everybody else in the film is – and there are some really impressive bits of almost Sorkin-esque drama delivered by even some of the US-based support – it is Ashraf Barhom, as the Saudi police colonel who, with his under-suspicion colleague works to stave off the initial disaster, and for his efforts is saddled with the FBI agents, who really carries the show.

His is a tough role – to basically balance out all of the elements of the film, from the plot concerns – such as the cultural differences between the US and arab worlds, or the political pressures that the team are under alongside the urge to see justice done – to the narrative ones – like the uncomfortable marriage of drama and dry humour, or of authenticity against action. Any real attempt the film makes to give the Arab world a human face is addressed through this colonel and his second-in-command – and in some ways with the Saudi prince who exerts some sway over events.

The film moves along pretty well for the first two acts, giving a thought provoking and almost balanced view of the process of running the investigation across cultural lines. In some ways, it feels like there is an attempt to give a stripped down, more narratively direct account of the themes in “Syriana”, although this film isn’t nearly as complex as that one, or indeed as the climate in the Middle East demands. Still, though, it’s thoughtful enough, and gives itself plenty of room to breathe, for the audience to take in how much difficulty and gravity there is in the protagonist’s situations.

And then, at around the two-thirds mark, the film seems to decide “This thoughtful cross-cultural thriller stuff is all great, but how about we make it awesome!”. At which point it cranks up the stereo, pulls out a six-pack of beer, gets you stone-drunk and sleeps with your girlfriend.

Which is to say all restraint goes out the window, and we’re suddenly in that final gun battle that every brooding Michael Mann movie takes ages building up to, and then explodes hard all over the screen.

This is when all of that beautiful cinematography and establishing of “The Kingdom” as a bona-fide Hollywood movie setting kicks into gear – there are car-chases, gun battles, close-quarters encounters, ‘splosions and somewhat more than mild peril, and while the director Peter Berg must have run the show, Mann’s influence is all over the weight and solidity of the action. As with the rest of the film, a fine job is done on the cinematography and editing, and this third act is just exhilarating and scary in equal measures.

It isn’t actually that easy to do with action sequences, but a few movies in recent years have managed to pull it off, and this is one of them.

If I have any misgivings about it, it’s that the more I think about it, the more I realise that the film’s earlier deft hand at trying to explore the west’s assumptions about Arabs kind of go out of the window at this point, and with two notable exceptions, every Arab that you see from a certain point is an enemy combatant, and by extension a terrorist. The out-loud explanation for why this happens is rational enough, and I’m not about to call “racism”, but it does diminish any loftier aspirations the movie may have tried to have earlier on.

That the film goes so apeshit, creating such a contrast between the end and the middle, doesn’t jar as much as you’d think it would, though. Perhaps it’s that pacing thing I spoke about before – that the film has earned a lot of currency with the audience by the time things suddenly go awry. Or perhaps it’s that the film has had a brooding background threat throughout, that the FBI team have been largely oblivious to, but that has been highlighted and reiterated again and again by their unwelcome babysitter – and by the fact that the viewer is given further signposts by the events going on outside of the FBI teams awareness.

Or maybe it’s that the film starts with such extreme and terrible violence that you kind of always realise it’ll have to descend back into that, before it’s done.