By: Mitch Ringenberg <[email protected]>

“The Kingdom” opens with an extremely unsettling scene involving a terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia. It is a scene that is frighteningly realistic and very disturbing. Peter Berg, director of “The Kingdom” who scored with the gritty football drama Friday Night Lights, does it again by directing this intense and brutal action thriller with some definite political overtones. It’s often very graphic and dark, but luckily, actors such as Jason Bateman and Jamie Foxx consistently provide comic relief throughout the film.

The movie follows a pretty basic war thriller formula. After a bomb goes off at an American oil compound in Riyadh, killing and wounding hundreds of Americans, the FBI is sent to Saudi Arabia to find the terrorist behind it. Jamie Foxx plays the main character, Ronald Fleury, which is a FBI agent who takes his job very seriously but is a family man at heart. The rest of the cast is very efficient with their roles including Chris Cooper, Jason Bateman and Ashrof Barhom, an unknown actor who gives the best performance in the film as a Saudi Arabian police chief.

What separates this movie from the other standard war films is an intelligent plotline, smart yet funny dialogue and its realistic action sequences. The message in the ending is sure to stir up a little bit of controversy, but the message is definitely thought provoking and sincere. It’s an especially relevant topic for today in these post-9/11 times. “The Kingdom” deals with the subject of America’s presence in the Middle East in a surprisingly mature way. It neither defends nor attacks the American troops or the Bush Administration. It simply tells a story. In this movie, the terrorists obviously have flaws, but it shows that America’s tactics aren’t always the best ones. People who view “The Kingdom” and expect to see a by-the-numbers action/war movie will be pleasantly surprised at what they see instead.