Chimpomatic

The Kingdom

(dir. Peter Berg)

Serviceable action thriller with FBI agents Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman and Chris Cooper finding an excuse to head over to Saudi Arabia to investigate a terrorist attack on a US expat compound.

Starts out with a fairly useful graphic zip through the last 100-odd years of Saudi history: desert, colonial rule, independance, oil, Bin Laden etc. Then we're hit with some cheating terrorists mowing down US citizens playing baseball in their suburban enclave inside "the Kingdom". Our agents know some of the US agents on the ground who get hit - this time it's personal and they're so not going to take "no, that would spark an international incident if we let more official US personnel investigate a crime on Arab soil" for an answer.

From then on, it's pretty much CSI: Arabia, as the quartet use their novel American concepts like "evidence" and "clues" to crack the case, helping out a friendly Saudi investigator along the way. He likes the Hulk and the Six Million $ Man too, so he's OK.

Been catching up on some Arrested Development reruns recently, so it was hard not to find everything Jason Bateman says hilarious, but other than that, the four leads were convincing enough - bantering away, dealing w US and Saudi red tape with good old fashioned straight talking and not being afraid to bend the rules a little when necessary. Good support from Danny Huston and the mighty Jeremy "Ari" Piven too, and there's a little cameo from director Peter Berg at the FBI briefing early on.

All feels a bit superficial ultimately, as if the mere fact of launching some Feds into a topical powderkeg is enough to make some kind of important message about the state of international politics/terrorism/the global interdependency on oil etc etc.