Occasionally I enjoy going to the movies alone, because it's just you and the film on screen (given that you don't have a theater of full of talkers and/or other distractions) And because of that, usually when I see a film alone it sucks me in alot easier than it would with a group of people. And I usually tend to enjoy a film way more that way. The fact that "The Kingdom" didn't pull me in has got me wondering if it's not really that good, or if I was just not into it.
"The Kingdom" is a film about a team of U.S. counter-terrorism investigators set out to find the perpetrators behind a deadly attack on Americans in a Middle Eastern country. It holds an interesting plot, and is beautifully captured on film, It starts off strong, but somewhere the movie starts to feel like one of Harrison Ford's Clear and Present Danger type films. I'm not really a fan of those movies anymore. They are all the same. There's a group of terrorists out there doing awful things and nobody can seem to put a stop to it except one man. Actually though in "The Kingdom" the one man scenario is replaced with four people, so it made it much more believable, but still the same.
Jamie Foxx is his usual self. Jennifer Garner is good, and hot... :) Chris Cooper is good. I had a hard time with Jason Bateman's lines in the movie, just because his "comic relief" felt out of place for such a serious plot line at times, but overall I thought everyone gave a good performance.
The Directing and the look of the film are very well done, so what is it about this movie that bugs me? I think it's because the movie shifts gears many times for the sake of making the audience "develop feelings" for a character. What they don't realize is that the scene's are wasting the plots time. This is a movie trick that if done poorly can give away the end to a movie way before it even happens. It can give away who's gonna live and who's is gonna die, who's the bad guy, even who's going to be the one to kill the bad guy, etc. "The Kingdom" has these giveaway moments and couples it with political opinions, which to me make for a bad script. OR, it means someone changed what was a decent script and added fluff.
Everyone dies. Just kidding. This is a modern day Harrison Ford movie, starring Jamie Foxx remember! The final scene of the movie is the most exciting part of the entire film. A suspenseful action scene where Jamie Fox and team rescue their teammate before being beheaded by terrorists. that makes the movie not completely boring. The thing that bugs me though is the very last line of the movie. The last line gives the impression that the whole film is meant to illustrate how the world is full of hate and that hate is bred on both sides of war. This is not an issue I disagree with, I just felt that if "THAT" is the real message the movie wants to give, this film took a lot of wrong turns along the way.
