The Kingdom (2007)

Review Summary

What good is geopolitical turmoil if you can’t have some fun with it? Hollywood has been posing that rhetorical question for a long time now — from “Ninotchka” to “Rambo” by way of a battalion of World War II combat pictures — but it has so far been a bit squeamish about turning the various post-9/11 conflicts into grist for escapist entertainment. “The Kingdom,” a whodunit/blow-’em-up directed by Peter Berg, corrects this lapse by taking aim at the ethical nuances and ideological contradictions of the war on terror and blasting away. Mr. Berg, an actor whose directing skills improve with each project (his last for the big screen was the underrated “Friday Night Lights”), shows himself adept at the rapid cutting and hectic camerawork that are fast becoming the lingua franca of action filmmaking. “The Kingdom” takes the breathless visual precision of the Jason Bourne movies — what the film scholar David Bordwell calls “intensive continuity” — out of the abstract hall-of-mirrors universe of intra-C.I.A. skulduggery and into a semiplausible world of international tension. Rather than explore that tension, as some other, more ostentatiously serious movies coming out shortly seem poised to do, Mr. Berg and Matthew Michael Carnahan, the screenwriter, do what they can to relieve it with fireballs and frantic chases. The result is a slick, brutishly effective genre movie: “Syriana” for dummies.

— A. O. Scott, The New York Times

Download
Adrive
Yastorage
Flyupload
Eatlime