Thursday, January 3, 2008
The Kingdom: Worth an E Ticket
My wife says my taste in films consists of "weird old foreign stuff with like, one guy in a room playing the accordion while a monkey tap dances." (Well there is the dancing chicken at the end of Herzog's Stroszek, so she might have a bit of a point there.) Well, regardless, I can still dig a good movie. And I trust my instincts and try to get something in the Netflix queue like Shooter or go to the theater when the likes of American Gangster hits the streets.
The Kingdom surprised me. It covered a lot of ground: FBI procedural, A Fantastic Four (Black guy with attitude, smartass, old guy and babe) in a strange land, Three Kings style political thriller, cop buddy movie with a twist (black guy with attitude bonds with Arab cop), and a Three Kings lite story ripped from the nearby vicinity of today's headlines.
Actor/Director Peter Berg was given the keys to Michael Mann's SUV here and he takes us on a helluva spin. There are three or four major action sequences that most action adventure films would be happy to score. The characters are easily recognizable by type, but you end up having some involvement because stuff is really moving and the "this isn't Chinatown anymore, Jake" factor is so expanded so exponentially as these FBI agents try to do their thing in The Kingdom of Saud, recreated impressively in the Arizona desert.
Jamie Foxx makes for a good lead. Chris Cooper as the veteran agent is always great to watch, but the surprise was seeing Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner again together in a movie (do they have the same agent?) after catching Juno last week. I could be sucked into another movie with those two, even something cheesy like a remake of The Thin Man. (I'm telling y'all it isn't really all about the monkey and the accordion)
I had the extras on for wallpaper and was impressed to find out that Berg is using the same three camera technique for coverage that Steve Buscemi borrowed from Theo Van Gogh for Interview. Although there wasn't an extreme use of super washed out exposures to give that hot desert feel, hand held doesn't need to mean a bunch of jiggle. Yet, there was an immediacy to the action and feel of this film that was likely the yield of this three camera setup technique.
The Kingdom won't change your life or politics, but I think it deserved better than the critics and public gave it. I'm thinking there are lots of folks who are going to feel that way when they get to see the DVD and some amazingly tense and well executed work here. Rocket launchers in street gunfights! You don't see that everyday. My reaction was to try to see if we had any popcorn in the cupboard.
This trailer gives you a little bit of taste of heat and grit and fireballs that will await you in The Kingdom.
posted by well-executed buffet at 4:50 PM
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