The Kingdom (2007)

Peter Berg's The Kingdom arrives with the sober bearing of a procedural and the temperament of a blunt instrument. A team of FBI agents flies to Riyadh to investigate the bombing of an American oil company compound, and the film spends its first hour on forensics, jurisdictional squabbles, and the slow, grudging courtship between Jamie Foxx's agent and Ashraf Barhom's Saudi colonel. The ensemble is notably integrated for 2007: a Black lead, a woman running the morgue, Arab actors handed scenes of genuine texture. None of it announces itself. The diversity sits in the frame without a press release attached, which is its own modest virtue and also its ceiling.

The politics are another matter. Critics at the time observed that the film folds the Khobar Towers bombing, the Riyadh compound attacks, and the 2004 Khobar massacre into a single wish-fulfillment engine, then drives it toward a closing line about killing everyone. Moustafa Bayoumi and Sharif Nashashibi both argued that the Arab characters exist mainly as obstacles or corpses, with one sympathetic Saudi permitted to carry the burden of proving the film is not what it plainly is. The message is martial, not progressive. There is no sermon here about carbon footprints or the gender wage gap. There is only a rifle.

We are left with a competent thriller that mistakes escalation for resolution. It has no interest in queer lives, body politics, neurodivergence, or the sins of capital, though it does blow up a facility belonging to an oil company, which is not the same as a critique of one. The film's cultural awareness extends to hiring well and then pointing a gun at the horizon. We classify it accordingly, and we move on to the next screening.