One for the Good Guys

...Jamie Foxx turns out to be a terrific action movie star, and it's exciting to see the wonderful Chris Cooper emerge from the slough of purse-lipped despond into which he has sunk in his recent movies and chew some of the very interesting scenery (Abu Dhabi doubles for Saudi Arabia...

...The middle deals with the frustrations of trying to do police work in a police state...

...Do we get to win this time...

...I hope he and Berg are looking for a vehicle in which McGraw can take center stage...

...The Kingdom is remarkably crisp and satisfying, and even more important for a suspense thriller, perfectly paced...

...It evokes not Syriana or Three Kings or The Bourne Ultidentipremacy, but rather gritty police procedurals of the 1970s like The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (about a subway hijacking in Manhattan), Dog Day Afternoon (about a hostage-taking in Queens), or The New Centurions (about the private lives of Los Angeles cops...

...The great surprise of The Kingdom is that it does not take this approach at all— which is why, among other things, it is going to be embraced by Americans who will be thrilled by its unapologet-ic depiction of a heroic crew of stateside good guys going into Saudi Arabia in pursuit of those who slaughter innocent Americans in Allah's name...

...But as geopolitical fantasies go, The Kingdom is far closer to the mark than the self-serious anti-American conspiracy pictures about the Middle East it leaves in the dust...

...This all serves to disguise the fact that The Kingdom is really nothing more than a satisfying fantasy oddly reminiscent of the most controversial foreign-policy fantasy of all time...

...Rambo asks his onetime commanding officer—a line that inspired chat-tering-class conniptions for months back in 1985...

...by John Podhoretz Unfortunate moviegoers who have suffered through Hollywood's recent efforts to make geopolitical sense of the Middle East may spend some of the running time watching this new suspense thriller, The Kingdom, with a sense of looming dread...

...The bad guys appear to be sworn enemies of the United States, but in the fullness of time we discover the truth behind the Big Lie: The United States is the sworn enemy of everyone else, the master puppeteer pulling the strings while all others stand around helpless and powerless before the might of the Omnipotent Ugly American...

...But by far the most memorable piece of acting in this film is a two-minute turn by a most surprising performer: country music superstar Tim McGraw...

...In Rambo: First Blood, Part Two, a crazed and imprisoned Vietnam vet is given the chance to lead a crew into 'Nam to rescue POWs left there after the American pullout...

...He plays a furious, grieving survivor of the attack, and (as Pauline Kael once said of Martin Scorsese's cameo in Taxi Driver) he brings such controlled intensity to the part that he burns a hole through the screen...

...Or militant Christians brilliantly disguised in burnooses who are killing Americans to try and start a holy war with Muslims that will hasten the End of Times...

...What Berg and screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan do extremely well with their fictional depiction of the methods and modalities of terror strikes, and their portrait of the FBI's forensic work, adds another layer of documentary realism...

...Berg is a very good actor himself who knows how to get the best out of his cast...

...Suffice it to say that The Kingdom provides not only a viscerally satisfying denouement but also a portrait of cross-cultural cooperation between Saudi cops and American cops that is as wonderfully pleasing as it is utterly fictional...

...Surely, any moment, there will be a scene in which it is revealed that the bombing of an American housing compound in Saudi Arabia—the central event in The Kingdom—was not the work of Islamofascist terror-John Podhoretz is The Weekly Standard's movie critic...

...Such is the nature of present-day geopolitical thrillers...

...Surely the conspiracy will go as high as the president, or perhaps even higher—to the vice president...

...Surely the oleaginous attorney general who tries unsuccessfully to block an FBI team's trip to Riyadh to investigate the bombing will be shown furtively contacting his friends at Halliburton, giving them the location and coordinates of his employees so that they can be killed...

...government...

...Or the U.S...

...In the movie's first third, team leader Jamie Foxx pulls off a skillful bank shot to get his squad into Riyadh...

...ists but rather of an evil oil company...

...he might be the first singing star since Bette Midler to outshine his own recording career with his acting work...

...Surely the extremely decent FBI director, who insists against the attorney general's wishes on trying to get to the bottom of the bombing, will be waylaid in a Washington parking garage by natty thugs in Zegna suits who will dispatch him with an assassin's bullet accompanied by the mild "phhhf "of a silencer...

...The team we see in The Kingdom has a personal motivation: One of their own, a universally beloved FBI agent, is among those killed...

...This is the fourth feature film made by director Peter Berg, and it moves him into Hollywood's first rank...

...The Kingdom was clearly inspired by the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing and the unprecedented degree of cooperation shown by the Saudi government in its immediate aftermath, when FBI forensic teams were permitted to scour the grounds in search of evidence...

...And in the heart-pounding final half-hour, the team finds itself under extreme duress in a Riyadh slum...

...There's nothing quite that pointed here, but just as Rambo offered its audience a small-scale do-over of the Vietnam war, so does The Kingdom offer a do-over of the aftermath of the Khobar Towers bombing and, to some extent, the war on terror...

...I can't explain precisely why without fatally compromising the movie's cleverly rendered plot, and especially its sensational final half-hour...

...McGraw made his acting debut in Berg's Friday Night Lights with a frightening and vivid portrait of an abusive alcoholic...