Latest movie in the War on Terror™

The Kingdom is not the worst movie Hollywood ever made. That prize has hundreds, if not thousands, of more worthy claimants. It could even be one of the top products of the year for the "entertainment industry."

The plot boils down to this: Maverick FBI agents led by Agent Fleury (the good, but not quite correctly cast Jamie Foxx) go to Saudi Arabia to solve a case in which hundreds of resident American civilians have been killed and wounded in a bombing attack. Along the way, the intrepid, wisecracking heroes must overcome the difficulties of operating under extreme security arrangements in a hostile environment, not to mention the opposition of the U.S. State Department and a horde of evildoers.

Only there is this one Saudi cop, a good guy (yes, that was a hint that he will be killed in the end). He helps them to overcome all obstacles to crack the case.

From our heroes' arrival until the start of an orgy of violence that makes up most of the last 15 minutes of the film, director Peter Berg's movie is equal parts "CSI: Saudi Arabia" and every lame cop TV series you ever saw --- transplanted, of course, to the territory of the world's biggest oil producer. The cop show part of the film was occasionally fascinating.

In the final 15 minutes, the crime scene investigators magically metamorphose into a crack team of Special Forces, and fortunately, since they are called upon to blast every last bad guy out a Saudi slum in a horrific sea of gore and blood. The combat scenes employ the fake realism typical of contemporary Hollywood -- the bad guys end up splattered to cinematically exact bits, while the good guys escape from RPGs, machine guns, machetes at the throat, etc., in the nick of time with a few scratches.

For good measure, the screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan makes sure to through in as many cliches and as much kitsch as the 110 minutes allowed. It is not possible to call this as a good movie.

And yet, there is a nice bit of potted U.S.-Saudi history at the beginning, and the film goes out of its way to show Arabs as human beings with families, and, as mentioned the hero who buys the farm is, in fact, an Arab, the cliched "good cop," a sympathetic trope in the mind of the moviegoer. It has enough finesse and humanity to avoid a failing grade.

By the time the final bloodbath was under way, however, I was ready to walk out. There wasn't any doubt that the good guys would win, and the only suspense was about who was going to get killed.

The Kingdom is not the worst movie Hollywood ever made; but that's not saying much.