Word: riyadh
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Call it the anti-Guantánamo. Young Saudis are captured in Iraq waging jihad against the American infidels. But instead of being shipped off to a bleak detention camp in Cuba, they are dispatched to a cozy chalet an hour outside the Saudi capital of Riyadh. Technically it's a detention center, but no one is forced to wear an orange jumpsuit or a blindfold. And far from being condemned to solitary confinement, its occupants are free to roam the landscaped courtyard and play Ping-Pong, volleyball and video games...
...headquarters, Agent Ronald Fleury is on the phone with a friend in Riyadh when the explosions occur, killing the buddy. So this time (like every time) it's personal. And after kissing his kids goodbye, Fleury is of to Riyadh. To solve the case, he brings along a crack trio that updates the multi-ethnic squads found in old World War II movies, and is guaranteed to piss off the religiously and socially conservative Saudis. Along with the black guy, there's the older man (Chris Cooper) who swears a lot; the woman doctor (Jennifer Garner) who insists on wearing...
...book officer who simply must be a decent fellow, since we see him playing nicely with his kids too. The two men bond in standard action-movie shorthand: Fleury punches out a man who had slapped Faris. Then we hunker down to investigation scenes from some CSI: Riyadh: ditch-diggings, bullet analysis and an autopsy. Faris has his own method: he searches corpses not for fingerprints but for missing fingers. Is this a flashback to Hitchcock's The 39 Steps? No, it's evidence that the dead man was a bombmaker. One of The Kingdom's best scenes has Fleury...
...could be Baghdad; it is Riyadh. The Kingdom shifts the current jihad one country south, from Iraq to Saudi Arabia. The movie also rouges the image of Americans in Islamic countries. Instead of being trapped in a four-year (and counting) quagmire, they come into town, clean things up and get out. What many thought would be the 2003 reality of a U.S. fighting force in Iraq has become a film fantasy...
...movies has helped audiences become their own Crime Scene experts, appraising the kick of an explosion, the roll of a vehicle after it's been blown up. Connoisseurs will savor an insurgent attack on the FBI team's van, a shootout between the Americans and the terrorists in a Riyadh neighborhood (when the missiles fly, you'll duck!), and the final faceoff in an apartment building. It fulfills the holy law of action movies: stuff blows up great...