.: Roberts' Reviews - Movie Reviews :.

The Kingdom begins as a thriller and ends on a quite and devastating note that we do not quite expect it to provide. One the surface the film is a lean, mean, no nonsense post-9/11 action picture, and as such it succeeds fascinatingly. It is both a hard-boiled procedural and a gruelingly intimate portrait of what it is like to be caught in the heat of an unwelcoming war zone.

But The Kingdom also digs deeper. When it is done engaging us in the excitement of investigation or the thrill of battle, it also makes us look inside the human soul, trying to discern just what impulse leads a human being to do thoughtless and unimaginable harm to another human being.

It is in these motions that director Peter Berg doesn't let us off the hook easily and the film becomes one of great thought and emotion. Although the film is comprised of both officers of the law and terrorists, Berg shows us that there is no inherent good or evil in any of his characters. They are merely humans who are forced to make decisions that they believe will contribute to the betterment of society, humanity, the universe, whatever it is they believe in.

The plot of the Kingdom revolves around a group of FBI agents (played by Jamie Foxx, Chris Cooper, Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman) who are sent to Saudi Arabia to perform an investigation after a group of terrorists disguised as National Guards target Americans in a vicious attack, leaving many men, women and children dead without mercy.

Not surprisingly, the agents are not welcomed and assigned a "babysitter" in Colonel Al Ghazi who is to watch over them, keep them safe until they leave and see to it that they do not get in the government's way while they perform the investigation by themselves.

Once we realize that the film is not so much about plot, but how it uses the plot in order to gauge the nature of its characters, we begin to see just what a great film the Kingdom truly is. By laying his character's emotionally bare for us, by stripping them of their generic constraints and allowing them each their own right to personal human complexity, Berg has delivered a film that rises above and beyond its call of duty. We know that Berg (The Rundown) can direct action as well as anyone else, and to be sure, The Kingdom has some of the most brutal, intimate, and exhilarating battle sequences since Black Hawk Down. However, where his films succeed most is in their ability to see past convention.

His Friday Night Lights was not so much a football film as one that explores what the medium of football means to a small town that has nothing else, and now he has given us a film that uses the climate of a political thriller in order to explore the complex link between human beings and their need to do violence upon one another.

We have seen many films recently which try to explore the psychological mindset of people engaged in terrorists acts (Paradise Now and The War Within to name a few), but The Kingdom does us one better. By viewing the situations from both sides, the film engages all of its characters on an equal playing field. Certainly terrorism is not an act to be rejoiced, but there is something uncannily frightening about the way in which the American's sometimes cannot find the line between justice and vengeance within even themselves.

Because the film presents this parallel we begin to relate to the American characters in relation to their Saudi counterparts. Compare agent Fleury (Foxx) to the head of the Saudi Terrorist organization. Both are men of honor, both have wives and children who they love, both are willing to sacrifice their lives for their country, and both believe in using violence in order to act for the common good of mankind. By making both men essentially the same, Berg has thrown a wrench into our collective cultural assumption of what constitutes good and what constitutes evil.

How easy it is, the film shows us, to become lost in this state of mind. The one thing that most importantly binds the agents and the terrorists together is that they both belong to an organization that places its cause above that of the individual. If the Kingdom has one overriding theme it is that sometimes humans get lost in causes that are greater than themselves, forgetting who they are as individuals and instead taking on a collective conscious.

We see that this is where violence begins and that's why we are left so saddened and emotionally drained by the time the final images of the film creep in to haunt our minds. Sometimes we become so lost, so misguided in our pursuit of the greater good that we alienate ourselves from ourselves, forgetting that we, just like everyone else on this planet are human beings with thoughts and emotions, loves and fears, and a consciousness that allows us to know the difference and choose between good and evil. The unsettling truth that permeates the underbelly of The Kingdom is that sometimes we become so disconnected from that consciousness that we cease to be human anymore and are thus willing to maim, torture and kill other human beings without the slightest regard for us, for them, or for any definition of common good whatsoever.