Peter Berg
The Kingdom

In the past days, during those cold and empty Christmas days, after finally finding a few free hours, I decided to put on a movie to return to the cinema after a month during which I had completely neglected this subject. Without any title in mind and driven solely by the desire to watch something, I found myself with this "The Kingdom", a film directed by Peter Berg (already a filmmaker of "Very Bad Things"), released in Italian cinemas in 2007.

The "The Kingdom" in the title refers to Saudi Arabia, the nation where most of the film's narrative takes place: after an attack in a residential area intended for Westerners, some terrorism experts, as well as skilled practitioners of military strategies, are sent to the scene to shed light on what happened. There they will be met by local police officer Al Ghazi (Ashraf Barhom), with whom, after some initial disagreements, they will forge a true friendship.

Thus presented, "The Kingdom" might seem like another American action movie meant to legitimize its military power and political choices. In part, this is true, but the film in question, while not representing anything transcendental, at least assumes a touch of originality by not necessarily dwelling on violence, shootings, and so on.

In reality, the narrative discourse of the plot revolves around the search for truth, somewhat what De Palma will do with "Redacted," although the result and intentions of De Palma are entirely different from this film. Beyond this element and the excellent cinematography by our own Mauro Fiore (who will arrive at the Academy Awards in 2010 with "Avatar"), the fourth feature film by Peter Berg offers no other interesting cues, remaining just a good exercise in style. A sufficient film where "nothing" happens for an hour and a half and "too much" happens in the last 10 minutes. A pity.