The Kingdom

I watched a film tonight that I had been really looking forward to. The Kingdom could have been really good. In the first fifteen minutes of the film I was struck – as I have been plenty of times before – by what a fascinating place Saudi Arabia is. I was well settled on the sofa, hoping for some insight into the lives of Saudis, political intrigue in the halls of power and some thought provoking hypothesising about the relationships between the extremists and members of the royal family.

There is very little of that in The Kingdom: what you have here is your average US action movie. And there is a place for that. As far as fairly formulaic terrorism films go, it was enjoyable enough. I liked the cast – there were a lot of people in it who I have enjoyed in other things (Michael out of Arrested Development, Lyla from Friday Night Lights and Ari from Entourage, for example).

The problem with formulaic, self-congratulatory, flag-waving American terrorism films is the complete focus they have on the highly moral, remarkably capable FBI agent, fighting to make the world a better place and get back to his loving family. It is not that I don’t believe in those characters – I’m sure there are plenty of them around, (though there are some less capable ones too – more films about FBI ineptitude please) – it is just that there are so many films about them.

To reiterate my original point, what I really wanted to know about was the lives of the Saudis. But far from revealing anything about them, they were dismissed, effectively, as utterly incompetent, one-dimensional characters, to a man. One Saudi policeman, charged with babysitting the Americans who visit the kingdom, comes good in the end. He also has children and wants to see an end to the violence, and in a touching exchange, the main American bloke proves he has grown fond of his Arab companion by asking his name. A real tear-jerker.

The Saudis, it seems, are incapable of investigating a terrorist strike themselves. But was it a cover up? A crippling lack of experience among the police and National Guard? There were certainly elements of both, but it was all rolled in together and portrayed as a demenour of generic uncooperativeness.

I know very little about the quality of the Saudi security services, and of course I would expect the US to have far more ability in this area. But I found it incredibly patronising that they were portrayed as so utterly hapless they hadn’t bothered to interview witnesses, examine evidence or do anything else at all by the time the US contingent had been flown in from Washington.

That observation, and resentment about the absence of any depth to the Saudi characters in the film, played on my mind throughout the film. Instead of an exposé of the highly complex and deeply fascinating world of Saudi politics, (or a film speculating intelligently about what those relationships might be in what, Ill admit, is a very secretive society), we got that formulaic, self-congratulatory, flag-waving American terrorism film. It could have been in New York, Los Angeles or London. The only difference would have been less frequent subtitles.