"The Kingdom": Film Review

After a student-group-sponsored, free, advanced screening of "The Kingdom" at my school, my friend who attended the viewing with me and I decided to write up our own reviews of the film to anchor the effusive criticisms that poured out of mouths like a broken faucet...lest we find ourselves in hours upon hours of arm-chair philosophizing. I mean we grad students for reals yo! We got over 1000 pages of dense, overly-pontifical writing to comb through per week and we have been trained to run our mouths for hours upon hours!

So, we went into the film deseperately clinging to every ounce of childlike optimism we had left bodies, hoping that damaging and stereotypical imagery in the trailer didn't necessary constitute a damaging, stereotypical film. Unfortunately, our hopes died in the cinematic cemetary of warm-hearted idealism within the first minute of this eeriely-reminiscent of "Delta Force" action-drama. Here is my friend "Abu Mack" (that's right, his name does mean "Mack Daddy")review, mine will be posted shortly:

"Delta Force IV"

"The Kingdom", the new Saudi-Arabia-we-explain-it-all action flick, from the first few seconds of the preview: a condensed panorama of minarets, missiles, angry brown eyes, and falcons, always falcons. This movie, which should be called Delta Force IV: is plain evidence that the business of entertaining America has not moved beyond Chuck Norris and Not Without My Daughter. I thought we all had agreed these were cultural embarrassments never to be repeated again? Even the worst mistakes deserve a sequel I guess.

Basically, the movie is a Middle Eastern Studies grad student's wet dream paper topic. The symbolism is so clumsy it knocks you unconscious with a club foot: the most innocuous arabs are the ones you should fear the most (24), you can never tell the good arabs from the bad arabs, the only good arab is the one who kills his own people with impunity. American military and civilian bases in Saudi Arabia are ahistorical apparitions that are good and wholesome, like baseball/ Saudi Arabia has a dark, evil history full of malice and oblique camera angles. Arabs don't know what technology is and need America to help them sort out their own internal problems. And the most parano-hygienic people on the planet are dirty, sweaty monkeys at the end of the day.

At least it was a university screening which I didn't have to pay for, meaning I could complain without funding anything objectionable, conscience clear. The sound quality was terrible, running every racist double entendre through an echo chamber until it was a triple or quadruple entendrementendre. A fratboy in the row in front of me kept floating taco farts our way. And during the most brutal, video-game, dehumanizing scenes of America-on-Arab violence, the COLUMBIA student audience cheered with glee. When the mopy, mouse-like Jennifer Garner, in a sweeping gesture of imperial feminism, drove a dagger into the crotch of a Saudi fundamentalist-- after a sensuous brawl that resoundingly drove home the point that domestic violence is a staple of arab lands-- the students yelled as if a touch-down had been scored. Where? not in this flop of a movie. I was reminded of Noam Chomsky's words about spectator sports and mass entertainment preparing a nation for war. It's so interesting, with American moviemaking, how the women characters are portrayed as soggy wet blankets (the emotional cores of films), who commit violence out of an always "defensive" mother instinct, who stick by their fallen husbands, take mercy on the innocent bystanders, just as they obliterate a whole section of the same society aged 18-35 and male. And Jamie Foxx, as the irreproachable black athlete-hero, whispers vengefully to an American victim, "I'm going to kill them all", he allows all the personal and political capital he generated in his previous, progressive films, to cloak the inhuman message of this movie behind the impenetrable barrier of race.
Please make sure this movie goes straight to video, preferably Saudi bootleg.