I got to see a special advanced screening of Peter Berg's The Kingdom with Sameer, Jason, and Jed last night. I was really excited about it because of the director, the producer, and the cast--and it lived up to my expectations as an action movie. But it should have stayed in that realm. It tried too hard to be a serious, Syriana-esque look at the oil situation in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. You could sense Berg's insecurity venturing into that area, because every time he strayed from action/comedy, he beat into your head just what exactly was going on and what it meant. Please, trust your audience or they won't trust you.As an action movie, it's stellar. Most of the time I was engaged and excited, but it was in the last 30 minutes that Berg shows his true colors: that final action scene was almost unbearably tense, on par with Mann's best works. The quality extends to the comedic element as well, thanks mostly to Jason Bateman's character (although the others have their moments too). And I absolutely loved the introductory credit sequence; it is one of the best I've seen in any movie recently.
And yet, everything else is absolutely filthy, like a pungent, noxious odor or being raped to death by a horse. The camerawork was almost as bad as The Bourne Supremacy. I'm all for equal rights, but please stop letting people with Parkinson's operate the camera. Both the thought and actual execution of artificially creating movement made me want to throw up. Another thing that pissed me off was subtitling the name/position of characters, once more adding fictitious complexity and marring an otherwise excellent piece. From the overbearing melodramatic music combined with slow-motion walking so we know we're supposed to feel sad to the back-and-forth finale to make sure we understand the parallelism, everything screams out obvious, blunt, heavy-handed filmmaking.
But don't let that stop you from seeing it. This has some of the best action you will ever see this year and keeps your heart pounding hard throughout. Look past the faults and watch it when it comes out this Friday. That is, if you're interested in any of the things I was excited about when I went in. It's worth the sledgehammer filmmaking techniques.
IMDb link: http://imdb.com/title/tt0431197/