From the director of Friday Night Lights and Very Bad Things comes The Kingdom, a politically charged action/suspense film set in Saudi Arabia.

After the opening credits give us a very brief history of American-Saudi relations we see a sect of Islamic fanatics blow up the living quarters near an oil compound, killing not only plenty of innocent workers and their families but also a few Saudi police officers as well. The Saudi government reluctantly agrees to let a team of four F.B.I. investigators into the country to examine the crime scene and help the local police try and track down and stop the sect that committed this crime from acting again.

The four agents - Adam Leavitt (Jason Batemen), Janet Mayes (Jennifer Garner), Grant Sykes (Chris Cooper) and the team leader Ronald Fleury (Jamie Foxx) - arrive under heavy security and are soon thrust into a world they struggle to understand. They soon realize that their lives are in danger simply by being in the country in the first place and that, like it or not, they're going to have to work closely with the Saudi government to get anything accomplished.

Used to swooping in and doing things their way, they find an ally in Colonel Feris Al Ghazi (Ashraf Barhorn), a Saudi police officer who simply wants to stop the terrorists from killing more innocent people. Unfortunately the team, allies like Feris are few and far between and the sect that carried out the first suicide bombing would love nothing more than to make an example out of these four agents...

The Kingdom has its share of flaws, no doubt, but it is an undeniably exciting and tense film that unfolds at a good pace and that, on the surface at least, attempts to put partisan politics aside in order to simply tell an interesting story. One could argue that the film portrays Saudis or Muslims in a negative light and that the film is propaganda - it wouldn't be difficult to make a case for that - but this is an action movie and not a documentary and this review will look at it as such.

The main performances in the film are decent, if unremarkable. Foxx is solid in the lead while Garner is more or less wasted, she seems to be there for the sole purpose of having a pretty girl in the cast. Bateman plays, not surprisingly, the snarky smart-ass of the group but he's good in these types of roles and he does it well. Cooper is fine as the southerner with a penchant for digging up clues but the best performance in the film comes from Ashraf Barhorn who gives Colonel Al Ghazi a very believable and human side. In fact, he gets more character development than any of the American players in the film, all of whom are little more than one dimensional cardboard cut outs (Foxx is shown with his son briefly but it's not enough to make us really flesh him out as anything more than a tough and stone-faced G-man).

The real reason to watch The Kingdom isn't the acting or the attempt at a political message of some sort, but the action scenes. It's here that the film proves its worth and the last half hour of the film is exceptionally exciting and as far more tense then the build up would have you expect. The film is paced well and moves quickly - it's never dull - and despite a lot of Bourne style handheld camera work, it looks quite good and is shot in such a way as to enhance the chaos the inevitably erupts out of the attacks in the film.

If you're able to put your personal politics aside from an hour and forty minutes and enjoy this action film for what it is, you'll likely walk away not just satisfied but genuinely impressed. The picture isn't nearly as deep as it would like us to believe and the characters are almost all instantly forgettable. The political angle wavers and doesn't really go anywhere but action fans will have to appreciate the tension and excitement that Berg and company have crafted here.

Video:

The Kingdom arrives on DVD in a very nice 2.35.1 anamorphic widescreen transfer. While some scenes look a little hot, this is obviously a stylistic choice and it suits the tone of the movie fairly well. Skin tones look good and detail levels are fine in both the foreground and the background of the image. There are no problems with mpeg compression artifacts nor are there any problems with heavy edge enhancement. A bit of line shimmering pops up in a few spots but other than that, the movie looks as good as you'd expect a new picture to look on DVD.