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Capone Investigates Peter Berg’s THE KINGDOM!
Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here.
I saw this one on Monday night, but I haven’t gotten around to writing a review of the film yet. I probably won’t until after I write about Ang Lee’s LUST, CAUTION (opening only in NYC today) and finish posting two interviews this weekend.
But I’ll say this much: I think it’s a solid movie, another in a long line from Berg. I think he’s a very good filmmaker with a pretty right-down-the-middle commercial mind. He makes big studio movies that aren’t really high art, but they’re certainly not cookie-cutter junk, either. He takes his movies seriously, even when they’re “just” entertainment, and he seems to be getting more confident with each film.
You should definitely check out the first four minutes of the movie, the stylish and fascinating opening title sequence. It’s a mini-movie, and is basically designed to make sure that even the dumbest, least-aware member of the audience feels like an expert on the modern history of the Middle East.
And then check out Capone’s review of the film:
Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here, gearing up for the Chicago Film Festival, which begins Thursday, October 4, with Opening Night film THE KITE RUNNER, the latest film from director Marc Forster, who helmed the previous CIFF opening night offering STRANGER THAN FICTION, as well as MONSTER'S BALL. I've seen many of the higher-profile films on tap for this year's event, and I'll have a more extensive preview for you next week.
And for the third, non-consecutive year, yours truly has been selected to be on the Festival jury for the short film competition, so I'll even be able to recommend the best of the four shorts programs this year. This is my busy season, and I'm attempting to brace myself, getting lots of sleep, drinking lots of fluids (but not too many; some of these films are long), and just generally getting the right frame of mind to watch between 35-40 films over the course of two weeks. I'll see you on the other side and a couple times in the midst of the chaos. But before I can think about the Festival, I've got a few new releases to throw your way.
Two weeks ago, the emotionally draining IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH had a limited opening to much critical praise and some small amount of box office. This week, that film's polar opposite — a film that cares more about action, revenge, and stereotyping than any kind of lasting emotional impact the war in the Middle East might have on the soldiers fighting in it or those back home — opens wide with a big, splashy ad campaign and a handful of high-profile actors in key roles. To give credit where credit is due, director Peter Berg's THE KINGDOM is a well-crafted shoot 'em up/blow 'em up movie with more heart than most action films these days. But one can't help but get the sense that Berg and company have dumbed down some of the most complex political scenarios in world history just to keep audiences' heads from exploding with details.
Making an interesting case that many terrorists are hiding in Saudi Arabia (remember that most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi-born), the film opens with an absolutely chilling series of events concerning a suicide bombing at a softball game in an area of Saudi Arabia where many American pipeline workers live. Once all of the rescue workers and investigators arrive on the scene, another bomb goes off, killing everyone. The U.S. government maintains its stance that it will not send any investigators to this friendly nation, but FBI Special Agent Fleury (Jamie Foxx) gets special permission to bring in a team of forensic experts to survey the scene and search for the killers. All of this has to happen in five days. The team includes such unlikely members as Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman and Chris Cooper, who seems a bit embarrassed to be in this movie. What follows are repeated exercises in good old American aggression. Although they are meant to be nothing more than observers and advisers, they essentially take over after the first day, bullying local law enforcement and walking around a somewhat hostile nation like they're bulletproof. Sometimes their behavior is pretty funny, but most time it's kind of cringe inducing.
It's clear early on that the local royalty may not want to have this crime solved, certainly not by Americans. One of the more fascinating characters in THE KINGDOM is the team's escort, a Saudi colonel played by Ashraf Barhoum (so good in PARADISE NOW and THE SYRIAN BRIDE), who actually seems to be genuinely interested in capturing the terrorist cell that carried out this terrible attack. Jeremy Piven is seen buzzing around in a couple of scene as a State Department representative who foolishly tries to get the team out of the area as soon as possible.
I don't want to give too much away, but it should come as no surprise that the team manages to do in just a couple of days what the entire Saudi police force can't (or won't) do with years of experience and knowledge of the area. Bullets are flying; bodies are dropping; familiar commands like "Move in!" and "Go! Go! Go!" and "Lock and load!" are bellowed with the appropriate amount of enthusiasm. But it became increasingly difficult for me to suspend my disbelief that this team wouldn't have been shut down after day one of behaving like a bunch of spoiled children who have never been told "No" in their entire lives. All the yelling, all the explosions, all the faux solemnity really began to annoy the piss out of me at about the halfway point. There's an interesting story to be told here, for sure, and I think Peter Berg is a solid director in most circumstances, but he and his actors are just trying way too hard to be bad-asses, when even the slightest amount of subtlety might have worked better.
Capone
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Love it!
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Typical badass American police officers kicking ass in another country... too ridiculous to watch.
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It just seems SO realistic!! I mean, who DOESN'T have a hip hop soundtrack blaring when they are killing people in the streets in a coutry in the Middle East??
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needs to die in a terrorist explosion.
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And I bet he's not going to watch this movie just to spite Kanye. What a loon!
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They had to include Kanye somewhere, otherwise he would have chucked yet another uppity, whinging hissy fit.
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Peter Berg makes solid popcorn movies, that are better then they should be. But Jamie Foxx is sooo impresed with himself that he just wants to be a bad ass in every thing he does now. He won an Oscar lets hope he can be more like Denzel and stop acting like Cuba because we all know Tranny Day Care Center is just around the conrner. And for my money Jamie Foxx is the funniest black guy dressed as a fat black women ever. Also did anyone notice that Danny Elfman is doing the music for this movie? Though ever since Planet of the Apes (like Tim Burton) he has lost his magic.
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that spent a lot of time in Afghanstian who really wants to see this movie. I predict it'll be very popular among the military and with people in the red states (or is it the blue states, I get them mixed up...the Republican states), look for a soild opening and a quick drop offbut hey it can't be any worse then Death before Dishonor...can it?
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as the worst kind of Hollywood exploitation. Hope the actual film turns out better.
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It's sort of like Syriana for dummies. I guess it stands alone pretty well as just an action film (although the 30 minute-long climax can be a bit tedious), but the attempt to tack on a meaningful ending is laughable and just spoiled the whole movie for me.
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...that the terrorists do *not* turn out to be opperatives hired by Dick Cheney to justify invading Saudia Arabia and taking the oil? Yep, I can see why The Kingdom will get some criticism for lack of antiamerican nuance.
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And I must say I was very impressed. I wouldn't even have called it an action movie if not for the first 20 and last 20 minutes. The middle really explains what Capone sees as child-like selfishness. The team gets to go over there because they know something, not just because they want it and will have it no other way.
I recommend this movie, it's really not what you think it's going to be. -
So is the last half and hour as crazy as all the commercials keep saying?
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Saw it last week, and in addition to the faux bad assness of the actors, the movie has nothing more on its mind than being another Rambo type action movie. In of itself, nothing wrong with t hat, but then it will occasionally interject pointed commentaries about the Middle East (essentially, can't we all just get along); meanwhile, it riles the audience up with protracted scenes of Americans being tortured, then getting payback on their Middle Eastern captors. The mixture was so poorly done. I would actually say that a more solid director than Berg could have pulled this story off (Michale Mann was a producer, he could have done this better). But Moriarity is right: the title sequence is fantastic.
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The last half hour: lots of BLACK HAWK DOWN type urban action scenes, practically lifted stylistically from that movie. Nothing original or groundbeaking, esp. after CHILDREN OF MEN.
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Wow, that kind of bums me out. I was hoping the movie had a little more depth to it than that. Still might check it out, but will probably wait for DVD.
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There's no Kanye in the movie...the ad people came up with that on their own. I saw this over the weekend and thought it was really good. I find it really hard to lump this into the action category. It's a war movie. And yes, the last 30 minutes are fucking unreal. If there's any complaint to be made, it's that it borders on sensory overload. I'm not a huge Jamie Foxx fan, but this is the best thing he's done in a long time.
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Why the over analysis? He does the same thing here, that he's done in his last handful of movies.
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Without oil, African babies will starve, civilizations will fall, and geeks wouldn't be able to post conspiratorial nonsense about Haliburton from mommy's basement. Oil is not evil, it is the lifeblood of the American economy which feeds, clothes and protects more helpless people than the rest of the world combined.
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This film DOES have a "Syriana for Dummies" whiff about it. Subtelty, anchorite, is what happens when intelligence is applied to human affairs. I hope, but do not expect, that the film will offer any insight into the middle east cluster fuck. And if it doesn't, than it dishonorably seizes a complex emotional and historical backdrop before which to indulge in formulaic action movie tropes. I love action films, too, but NOT when they serve to erase REAL nuance, pain, and yes, SUBTELTY. Instead of merely BEING stupid, those films ENCOURAGE stupidity. Not that The Kingdom necessarily will. I haven't seen it yet.
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African babies are starving. A contribting factor is the structures of ownership which dominate the natural resources of the developing (too optimistic?) world. They are usually not very short of organized crime cartels, supported, in large measure, by the consumption pace of the industrialized world (including, along with the over-used "West", nations like China and India). Oil consumption, if it's from these corrupt foreign sellers, is not feeding very many African babies. In fact, our purchases encourage the cartels to maintain their corruption. This type of oil economy hasn't kept civilization from falling at all; it has nurtured systems of domination and repression in our most impoverished nations. Policy for how to do business with foreign cartels and governments needs to be drastically overhauled if the fossil-fuel economy could actually accomplish the things you pretend it does already. And the only way to get leverage over those sellers (who are more like drug-dealers) is to develop a robust and diverse domestic energy industry. As long as we're jonesing for a fix we can't tell the dealer what to do.
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That's my review of the film, as done by Milhouse when he was watching Pootche the Rappin Dog not going to the explosions. Great, amazing opening, great ending, draggy middle part. Seriously, what the heck was that scene with the FBI Office Dude doing smack in the middle of the movie? Tad too procedural to be interesting at times as well. Great ending, though, and opening, so its worth looking out.
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Yes, Peter Berg shows a very assured hand with his staging of the action and with his actors. I think he is a talented director. THE KINGDOM does get off to a promising start - great opening credit sequence, shocking beginning - but this is one of those movies that doesn't seem to know what it wants to be. It's actually the opposite of "solid". You get several ideas of what the movie could have been, while watching it - a hard-hitting political drama, a human tragedy investigative, a serious cop-buddy flick (with Foxx and Barhoum), a straight-up thriller set in a hotbed location. Ultimately, the film declares itself a shoot-em-up, and a bit of a ridiculous one at that. These heroes, the American ones anyway, are virtually unstoppable. I didn't believe in this. The performances were fine. Ashraf Barhoum was the best.
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I thought the film was well-made, the last half hour is a particularly well put together action sequence, but the film does lack heart and the behaviour of the FBI team really is cringe-inducing sometimes, verging on arrogance. I really hope that someone didn't think Foxx's character's attitude was meant to be reasonable or justified.
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A couple of reviews of the film used this phrase and I think it's pretty apt.
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That shit was too convoluted in an attempt to come off better than it really was. ("Hey, look, if we throw alot stuff up there it'll look deep!) I likes me explosions and less bullshit scens like Fat Clooney having an awkward conversation with this son. This still had that frustratingly vague minimalism in the dialogue and a couple of pointless scenes thrown in, but not as many as that kitchen-sink clusterfuck that was Syriana.
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THAT PETER BERG CAMEO?? Huh people no one had said anything about the star of the SHOCKER making an appearance (be it random) in his movie? This movie was good, not as good as I was hoping (i lived in the middle east for two years, so I felt compelled to see it) but better then the reviews. Ashraf Barhom should get a best supporting Oscar nom for his work here, he out acted all of those hollywood types and was the most interesting part of the movie. Peter Berg is going to make amazing movies in the future.
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ALSO honostly WHO the fuck brings there like less then 5 year old kid to a midnight showing of a movie, I am tired of audiences ruining movies for me! I went to the late show to avoid it, its worse then bringing your 10 year olds to see Halloween (though they were not the reason that movie sucked).
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Yeah, I noticed the cameo also.
I saw the film a couple of weeks back in a preview. I didn't realize it hadn't been released in the US. I thought the story was well done, and it didn't over "assholify" all muslims, just crackpots. It was good how Fox's character and the Saudi cop formed a bond.
I hated the camera work though. At the cinema, it was nauseating. Especially with the close up face shots. When they were speaking your eyes would be tracking round and round 30-odd feet. My wife actually left midway as the motion was making her ill.
It will definitely look better on a smaller screen -
...is an action movie with a certain degree of brains. Kind of like Apocalypto. You can call that dumbing down if you'd like, but at least it's not as pretensious and self-important as most "political thrillers." I'd like to see movies like The Kingdom make it into the Summer movie season. Oh, and I don't remember hearing any Kanye West in the movie.
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Syriana was only convoluted to those it was smarter than. I suppose some people it was smarter than sensed the complexity of it and just pretended to like it out of pride, too. To the rest of us it was an ingeniously complex treatment of the powers and interests that encourage the insane corruption and chaos of the greater middle east. Just because you couldn't hang on doesn't make it a "kitchen sink cluster fuck". Try watching it again, and this time hold on with both hands.
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Jason Bateman rocked! As we left I told my wife I couldnt believe a movie got made in Hollywood where the bad guys were terrorists.
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"Chris Cooper, who seems a bit embarrassed to be in this movie."
What are you basing this on? -
Sep 30, 2007 10:22:15 PM CDT
As you can tell by some of the posts in this talkback..
by napoleondynamite
...THE KINGDOM will probably appeal to a certain type of knuckle-dragging retard who need to have everything simplified into an "America, fuck yeah" mentality, but it doesn't really have anything to say and is nowhere near as serious or important as it thinks it is. On a purely artistic level, it's just a badly flawed movie. "Syriana for dummies" is completely accurate. The writing is dumbed down. The characterizations are trite (the Saudi police chief guy is a particularly insulting, patronizing "good Arab" in which virtie in an Arab is defined by being obsequious and submissive to the Americans. He is essentially Jamie Foxx's Tonto. There are some plot developments which are as contrived and stupid as anything you'd see on Law and Order and there are some "clues" that are as silly as something you'd see on Scooby Doo. Like how, for the covnevience of the movie, all terrorist bombers are missing the same two fingers and that's how you can tell if an Arb is a terrorist bomber, because he's missing the last two fingers on his left hand. There are some good actors like Cooper and Bateman who I generally like but are just kind of mailing it in here. Cooper, in particular, is doing the same didactic, deadpan kind of role he's done in a million other movies but his dialogue just falls short this time. Jennifer Garner pollutes this movie like a turfd. There's no reaon for her to be in it except to have a "girl" in the movie for demographic reasons and she's in way over her head. She can't really act and her performance in this thing is so overmannered and cutsey that (stuff like constantly smacking on lollipops) that I found myself rooting for the terrorists to catch her and cut her head off. There's a rah rah shootout at the end and then a really hackneyed tag to end the movie (spoiler.....both sides think they can win by "killing them all." How penetrating). I think there was more inight in Parker and Stone's TEAM AMERICA than there is in this POS. While I'm at it, "IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH is a so-so script elevated by a great performance from TLJ and slightly marred by a clumsy, heavy-handed final image but still a decent film.
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Is he an asshole? I think I saw an interview on Australian TV for the football film he was involved in, and all he could talk about was how fucking professional and hardcore he and his main star was. Looked like he belonged on that show Entourage. Speaking of, is it really just about 4 or 5 assholes cruising around town all day? How the fuck is it popular? Asshole envy?
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