Karnataka   

The vicious circle of violence

Action: A scene from the film ‘The Kingdom’.

The Kingdom (English)

Cast: Jamie Foxx, Chris Cooper, Jennifer Garner

Director: Peter Berg

This is totally an American thing — their ability to integrate various historical occurrences into popular culture via Hollywood and milk it dry for all the dollars it is worth. And we in far away India can watch it with the same level of interest and involvement as we would accord Britney Spears’s custody battle or Lindsay Lohan’s perilous road from rehab to recovery.

There was Rambo to deal with Vietnam and gazillion World War movies for a cheery gung-ho Hollywood perspective. Now there is 9/11 and the war against terror, and Hollywood has different ways of tackling the issue — the earnest talky “Lions for Lambs” approach, the super-intelligent “Syriana” one or the no-holds-barred thrumming action movie which is the path “The Kingdom” chooses to tread, which is not at all a bad thing.

The movie starts by putting matters into perspective. First there were the Arabs doing their own thing in the desert, and they were all united and the Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, was created. Then oil was discovered, and nothing was the same again. Saudi Arabia became the biggest producer of oil while the U.S. became the number 1 consumer.

Americans set up oil companies in Saudi Arabia, where there were little islands of America where the employees lived like they would in a suburb in their own country, playing baseball, walking their dogs and watering the lawns (in the desert?). And this brutal yoking together of the East and the West threw up a special brand of reactionary violence.

When more than 100 employees are killed in the Gulf Oasis Western Housing Compound in Riyadh, the FBI send in their finest to solve the crime. Team FBI, led by special agent Ronald Fleury, includes forensic expert Janet Mayes, intelligence examiner Adam Leavitt and explosives person Grant Sykes.

They have been given five days to solve the crime, which they do in spectacular style with guns blazing and cars spinning and coming to a satisfying stop in great balls of fire. They deal with palace intrigue, general mistrust and cultural differences with a little help from good cop Colonel Al Ghazi.

Like “Transformers” earlier this year, there is something touching about the naiveté of Americans thinking that there is black and white, that they are totally on the side of the right and there is nothing that cannot be solved by watching a couple of Seventies shows on telly!

The cast is uniformly superb — from silky-smooth Jamie Foxx as Fleury to Chris Cooper as folksy-antics-hiding-a-super-mind Sykes and no-nonsense but deliciously curvy Jennifer Garner as Janet Mayes.

Director Peter Berg employs a lean, mean fighting machine style with some of the mandatory editorial flourishers that are de rigueur in action films today. Oh, and by the way, the chilling conclusion shows there is no way to break the circle of violence, but one can take heart in the movies as the circle of violence leaves an opening for a sequel.

Mini Anthikad-Chhibber

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