The Kingdom

The war on terror gets its first attempt at a Rambo film with The Kingdom, a silly action movie that tries to deliver some sort of message with its machismo. While director Peter Berg shows he’s competent filming a shootout, the politics of this movie are garbled. Ultimately, this is the sort of hollow mess that made ’80s films like Red Dawn and Missing in Action so sickening. Jamie Foxx plays an FBI agent who gets himself into Saudi Arabia after a lethal terrorist bombing at an American compound. A prominent American agent was killed in the attack, and this makes Foxx’s elite team consisting of Jennifer Garner, Chris Cooper and Jason Bateman, thirsty for some blood. It’s when the film tries to masquerade as a message movie that it falters. The movie’s final moment is nothing but laughable, some sort of ominous statement about how terrorists are always being created. Junk.