The Kingdom. Thumbs up. I'd rate it an A-.

The only problem I had...

SPOILER ALERT

...was the last minute of the movie.

It's not that it tries to be politically correct, it's that this attempt fails.

Miserably.

Okay, I really mean it -- spoiler alert -- I'm going to tell you the end of the movie.

At the end, the four FBI guys are in their cubes and one of the members asks the team leader (Jamie Foxx) what he said (at the beginning of the movie) to get Jennifer Garner to stop crying:

Adam Leavitt: What did you say to Mayes to get her to stop crying?
Ronald Fleury: I said we were going to kill them all.

And then Director Peter Berg does his pious ham-handed cut to Riyadh where a woman asks a child what his grandfather (the movie's Osama bin Laden figure) whispered to him before he died: "He said we would kill them all."

Yeah, it's set up to allow Berg to show his face at the soirées, but the real problem is that the statement is so inconsistent with the Fleury (Jamie Foxx) character it stands out like Jennifer Garner in a town full of burqas. It's a stretch and it doesn't work.


At worst he would've said "We're going to go there and get some justice."

* * *

Also, the character playing Gideon Young, the Attorney General, is set up to be a religious fanatic like Orin Hatch, but he swears in private, well,

...like Orin Hatch.


But Jeremy Piven, the State Department weenie, and Richard Jenkins as the head of the FBI both work well.

* * *

Actually, it's my understanding that the original ending was nixed as too depressing:

The first Saudi on the scene in the movie, Sgt. Haytham (pictured on the left) was beaten by the Saudi National Guard general in charge. In the movie, Al-Ghazi (very well played by Ashraf Barhom), the Saudi policeman comes to the aid of Sgt. Haytham, however, you can see that Sgt. Haytham is troubled after being tortured by his own government for his suspected involvement in the bombing. The nixed ending has Sgt. Haytham saying goodbye to the FBI team at the air base with a hidden bomb strapped to his chest. Chris Cooper (Sykes) wrestles Haytham away from the group, but Haytham detonates it before Sykes can get clear.