This one doesn’t need a lot of interpretation. It is exactly what you expect: a well executed action thriller that hits every button a Hollywood movie with pretensions to semi-seriousness has to hit. We have: lots of children, often conducting themselves bravely after the loss of a parent; plenty of bonding across religious and national lines; expert American investigators able to solve crimes with just a few fibers and access to the Internet; the requisite cowardly top American officials, more interested in politics than solving crimes and saving lives.
However, it is highly competent with some superbly choreographed actions sequences (the last 20 minutes is genuinely nail-biting), a nicely assembled group for the FBI team, including Jamie Foxx and Chris Cooper, and a semi-serious political message. Most of the politics is about the relationship between the US and the Saudi governments, but you also get a glimpse of divisions among Muslims, and the final seconds of the movie entirely subverts the gung ho optimism of heroic police work. Lastly, you have a wonderful Jeremy Piven, hamming it up, doing his best Ari impersonation as a deputy head of mission in Saudi Arabia. Plenty of fun, unlike that cold fish Anderson fellow.
glad i read this, chris. i was much less well-disposed towards this film before reading the good things you say about it. what made me annoyed/angry was the overt message (belied by the final seconds of the movie, which therefore feel fake) that american ramboism is the way to go where foreign policy is concerned. a small group of well-chosen FBI heroes with strong personalities and possibly good looks can accomplish what a huge foreign political-police-military apparatus cannot. and of course the underlying vengeance motif is pretty disturbing too. revenge movies are their own valuable genre (and i know a few contributors to this blog love ’em!), but selling a retributive conception of international relations in this time and age, as if it were necessary to put more fuel on that specific fire, is nothing short of criminal.
but yeah, man, the last action sequence was tres kewl.
oh, i meant to say: compare this to the unfortunately named a mighty heart and you have a sense of how a film that doesn’t shit on our countries looks like.
I am glad both of you wrote about this, because it made me give it a look–and I liked it more than I’d expected.
I wanted to add in just a couple of points, mostly dealing with how the film uses all the (very well-rehearsed) tropes of these action thrillers yet, even when most formally conservative, there’s a whiff of revisionism in its politics–not just, I’d argue, that final line. Mostly I cede Gio’s point–the film imagines that the personal is the proper realm of political engagement, and sidesteps (when not actively bashing) what Gio called the “foreign political-police-military apparatus”. But even in shifting in familiar generic terms to male “buddies” as a venue of cross-racial/-religious bonding, there’s some interesting shit afoot:
–The opening credits are, while abbreviated and not particularly complex, still essentially a history lesson. When your film is about to go buddy-buddy and personal, why frame or cue the audience about such broader histories?
–I found it interesting that the film is weakest, most generically flat (or just most generic) when detailing some of the Americans’ relationships and chatter before they depart. What ought to be stirring or emotional–the domestic space of the American heroes–seems exaggeratedly empty. Meanwhile, the head Saudi officer, Faris Al Ghazi, is shown with little dialogue in a fairly interesting domestic space… I think the film exploits the viewers’ familiarity with conventions of domestic/personal space (as the necessary space of “politics”) in ways that shift our identifications. Not radically, but still substantively.
–I also thought that the revenge plot–even before the final punch of the closing lines–is complicated persistently through the movie. Again, not radically refuting it, but exploiting the generic conventions in ways that open up spaces for a different kind of viewer engagement. I am thinking in particular of the ‘big’ capture of baddie Abu Hamsa, which rather than cathartic, rather than merely sacrificing some of the ‘good’ Others so that the Americans might learn a lesson (though the film does this, too), in addition focuses intently on a child killed and on (absurdly cast as FBI forensics agent) Jennifer Garner’s grief and horror as she tries to save the kid.
I agree the film’s politics don’t register as forcefully as a comparison to A Mighty Heart or others we might name, but it’s interesting to me that this film pitched pretty squarely down the plate for the American action fan might register any political complexities, in a genre and to an audience often imagined as … well, Ramboed into easy spectacles.
I wouldn’t disagree with any of this, and these are some typically smart reactions to the movie. I actually watched it again about a month back and was more impressed than the first time around.
I think what led me to sneer a little at this movie first time around was its use of children. I really thought that the repeated appearance of children as a device to soften the political conflicts and provide typical protective/revenge motivation for the main actors cheapened and diluted most of the subversive themes that were present just beneath the Ramboed ones.
I thought the movie had the potential to be closer to a ‘Syriana’ or ‘The Siege’ in the sense of action thriller that pays serious attention to politics. But it backed off too often. Still, it deserves better than my review gave it. And I have to say that Ashraf Barhom, playing Faris Al Ghazi was mesmerizing most of the time he was onscreen.
I’m using this movie, along with 24 , in my class, so I just watched it. It is a very odd combination of action slickness and ambivalence. The final moments are actually prepared for a number of times: it turns out that the pompous Attorney General is correct in identifying the mission as one of “vengeance” and the American FBI team appears in some way to carry out the vengeance called for by the man whose wife was killed while looking out her window in the oil-industry compound. The last 15 minutes or so are so hyped up that it is in some ways difficult to remember anything that came before. The grotesque privilege and medieval posturing of the Saudi elite actually works to move some understanding, if not sympathy, toward the radical terrorists. All in all, it was somewhat puzzling to me, in the manner of something like Black Hawk Down where there is a similar odd affinity for the American military (or, in this case, American law enforcement) existing side by side with a certain contempt toward larger foreign policy goals.
How are you using 24 in your class? Are students required to watch every week? I’m curious. Sounds very interesting.
Jeff–Your idea is a good one, but we just watched a single episode to see how the formula matched up with contemporary events and to compare it to The Kingdom . I’ll be curious to see what the students come up with, but with this class, the analysis generally remains rather simple.
Every season I get caught up in the hype and I watch the opening 2 or 4 episodes, played back to back, ideally commercial-free. Did it again for this new season and once again I was bored to tears and frustrated by the utter predictability of every move, every forced emotion, every blind alley, every contrived bureaucratic muddle. I can’t imagine actually tuning in every week to watch so little happen; it would be the longest 24 hours of my life. Torture? Damn right.
I agree that the show is highly formulaic–in fact, after 8 seasons, absurdly so. But it is in the variations that I find the most interest–how will they characterize yet another foreign threat? How will the conspiracy inside the government be portrayed this time? The formula is particularly useful for the class because it is easy to highlight the way certain narrative procedures are applied and varied. But, personally, I don’t know if I have the interest to follow this whole new season. It seems as if I am losing my interest generally in serial television, though perhaps the most recent season of Dexter , when it is finally released, will reactivate it.
Dexter remains superb. Easily my favorite of the fall HBO/Showtime programs. Lithgow was especially good this past season.