Went to see the Kingdom the other night. Not a fan. Thought it might be interesting at the credits, as it opened with some fast moving blurb about Oil and America’s relationship with Saudi Arabia, but I quickly lost hope as the film opened and the acting was fairly dire.

I knew the film was primarily an action flick from the style of the marketing, but it felt like the director thought he was making an intelligent political thriller or sorts. He really wasn’t. And unfortunately he wasn’t even making a good action movie.

I do think the film was well intentioned, but the director lacked the ability to make the film he wanted to I reckon.

The Kingdom had no balls and shied away from any tough decisions, while failing to contextualise Saudi culture enough to credibly achieve any furthering in our understanding of the situation in the Middle East.

Please let me know if I’m the only one who got these vibes from the film, because at times I felt the director was so condescending, confused and possibly ill educated that he thought he was being clever by casting an African American in the lead, as if to remind us that black people used to be the butt of our racist tendencies too…

Maybe I was giving the director far too much credit, maybe it was just a crap film plain and simple.

It’s just that every now and then it seemed to want to show that underneath-our-skin-we’re-all-flesh-and-blood-at-the-end-of-the-day but mostly it just seemed to be saying that Saudi people are fairly thick, but there’s one cop who at least recognises that they should let America help them investigate.

And the story sucks, despite being an FBI ‘investigative team’ they rely on the ineptitude of the terrorists to win out at the end. No investigation needed then.

UPDATE… ok, so after forming the above opinion I then went to look for an image to accompany this post and found this article in the NY Times which leads me to believe the film is crap because the team were indeed confused about what film they were making and went to great lengths to try not to offend anyone, leading to a film that has no message except what you choose to apply to it yourself - a bit like a blank canvas for you to project your political views on to.

It turns out the message of the film is that you can now acceptably exploit complex and divisive political situations in the real world to make facile buddy movies without getting into trouble with any particular social group.

Great.