REVIEW: The Kingdom0

So, I went to see “The Kingdom” last Sunday, and here is my take on how it was! As always, I will try to keep it as spoiler-free as possible!

I really had high expectations walking into this film. I found the overall concept of the story interesting, and the actors looked like great choices (Jamie Foxx is also pretty much awesome in every film he does) and the trailer was pretty cool, so it would be a lot of fun to see if it lived up to my high expectations.

The story isn’t really one to celebrate too much, since it’s pretty much a standard “terrorist threat against the US on foreign soil” story which leads to the government sending in a team of professional problem-solvers and forensic detectives. For me, the story worked good, considering what kind of film this is. I expected it to be much more political, somewhere around the level of “Syriana” (which I actually didn’t like that much) but it’s pretty much kept on a rather basic level throughout the film. It’s also trying to be very politically correct with it’s statements and portrayal of it’s characters, which works out fine but also drags away some of the interest in the story. I loved the final quarter of the film, where the pace really picks up and the tension is very, very high. The final 15 minutes are almost unstopped continues extreme action which is actually very cool. Also the beginning of the film is extremely action-packed, and also very terrifying in more than one way.

The acting is pretty good, and all the actors and actresses pretty much play their roles by standard procedure. Nothing really stands out in any of the performances, but both Jamie Foxx, Chris Cooper and Jason Bateman put forth great performances. It’s just that nothing is really that memorable. While Jennifer Garner is a great actress, I found her place in this film to be a bit out-of-order. It seemed as if the writers just wrote a “girl” part for her, where her main objective throughout a big part of the film is to walk around with a tight t-shirt. But she’s also great in the action sequences, I just feel that her character and the placement of her in terms of costumes could have needed a rehash.

There are some really cool effects and setpieces in the film. There’s no real obvious effects in the film, but judging from how some of the sets look, I bet they must have used some kind of digital set extension to keep costs down. Visually, and in a cinematography perspective, it’s very impressive with the way that it’s shot on both 35mm film and on digital cameras (such as in “Collateral”, which really gives the film a much more documentary look). I was quite inspired by how some of the sets were shot, with cool details often at the sides of the frame, so make sure to sometimes not look directly at the actors in a scene (as you should do sometimes in any film, particulary if you’re watching it for the second or third time round), and you’ll find some pretty interesting stuff in this film.

The music by Danny Elfman was great (if somewhat unmemorable) and added to the tension in some of the scenes towards the end of the film, but the sound design is where the movie really shines. It has in a way a very surround-focused sound-design that really helps sell some of the scenes and it all was very impressive in the theatre. During some of the earlier scenes it seems like the filmmakers deliberatly had a pretty quiet and unsurprising sound design (particulary in the LFE track) to then suddenly explode in audio from all directions. This worked very well, and is definently something that impressed me throughout the movie.

So I thought this was a pretty good film, even if it had it’s flaws in some of the casting and character profiles. Still, I think it’s a very good film and I would recommend it to any fan of high-octane action movies. Also, it has one of the coolest intro sequences ever made!

Verdict: 8 out of 10