With Allah On Our Side

[September 26th, 2007]

First of all, I have no doubt you are the kind of global citizen who, when faced with the rise of radical Islam, tries to take a reasoned and unprejudiced view. But just between you and me: When you read the reports of a bombing in London or Tel Aviv or another beheading in Kabul, or when you watch the latest clerical video instructing the Great Satan to repent or die—there’s a part of you that wants to see somebody grab a gun and waste these bastards. It’s just a little part, and you’re not proud of it, but it’s there. Isn’t it?

I’m asking this because director Peter Berg has made an action movie called The Kingdom that is set in Saudi Arabia, that includes a great many bastards getting wasted, and is ultimately a responsible and even a very fine piece of filmmaking. It’s also a noteworthy development. Whatever people may say about the crassness of Hollywood, movie studios have not rushed to exploit jihadism for popcorn entertainment. Six years after The Day That Changed Everything, the multiplex looks remarkably similar: When James Bond or John McClane takes on a terrorist, that evildoer is white and secular. So it takes a certain amount of nerve to make a movie that starts with a suicide bombing in Riyadh and builds to Jamie Foxx kicking down doors.

So The Kingdom is a bold movie. What makes it a good movie is how Berg starts with an initial atrocity—a broad-daylight attack on an American housing complex—and then carefully adds information, until we gather exactly how complex the situation is. An FBI investigative team made up of Foxx and Jennifer Garner (both, as usual, slightly lacking in personality) as well as Chris Cooper and Jason Bateman (both, as usual, a joy to watch) flies into Saudi Arabia, where they’re faced with an inquiry hamstrung by Saudi and American authorities. Berg uses the delays to capture a sense of place. He employs the same lyrical montages that distinguished his football movie Friday Night Lights —only this time he concentrates on Friday night prayers. The Kingdom follows two Saudi lawmen as closely as it does the Americans, and the subtle performances of Ashraf Barhom and Ali Suliman convey the idea the Middle East isn’t all that different from, say, Texas: People work their jobs, care for their families, and find meaning in doing both with dignity.

When violence finally arrives in The Kingdom —which it does, and in spades—it’s a double-edged sword. The movie’s final 30 minutes are so richly vengeful they border on crass wish-fulfillment, but what’s come before casts doubt on the wish. Late in the door-to-door fighting, Foxx pauses before blasting his way into another room to ask, in good movie-star style, “Which side of this door is Allah on?” The question resonates. Until Peter Berg arrived on the scene, the predominant tone of movies about Islamist terrorism has been resignation—the feeling there’s ultimately nothing we can do. The Kingdom is brash enough to imagine all kinds of things we can do. And it’s honest enough to show what happens when we do them.