For the first hour and change, The Kingdom is a police procedural; following a suicide attack on a compound housing Western workers (employees, we are meant assume, of the oil industry), an FBI team goes to Saudi Arabia with the intention of tracking down the terrorists under the guise of helping the Saudi police track down the terrorists. A brief scene of a general torturing a police officer whom he wrongly suspects of being involved in the plot serves as a short hand notice that the Saudis don't know what they're doing: hence the need for the Americans to put on a tutorial in crime scene investigation, canvassing for witnesses, interrogation techniques, and forensic pathology. For all of The Kingdom's implausibilities (Jennifer Garner waltzing around Riyadh in a t-shirt and with her head uncovered chief among them), the investigative techniques employed are a far more accurate depiction of combating terrorism than the "I don't have time for this" kneecapping style of Jack Bauer. Unfortunately, the filmmakers inexplicably abandon this somewhat realistic approach during The Kingdom's third act, staging a car chase/gunfight triangulated somewhere between Clear and Present Danger, Heat, and Children of Men in which the plot is resolved in a hail of Yankee bullets. It is at this point that the movie, which is clearly based on (or "inspired by") the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, utterly divorces itself from reality and gives American audiences the kind of finality and release that has eluded us thus far in the real-life War on Terror. The Kingdom is escapism, which is fine by me, as it's Hollywood's stock and trade. It's just a shame that the filmmakers felt the need to abandon, and in doing so inadvertently repudiate, the genuine police tactics they espouse for the bulk of the film, and instead embrace the kill-'em-all Playstation mentality that has led this country down the path of secret CIA prisons, extraordinary rendition, and enhanced interrogation techniques. That The Kingdom ends with a slapped-on pointed warning about the unending cycle of violence seems like sort of a sick joke given the gleeful bloodbath that immediately precedes it.
