The Kingdom…
CSI has finally gone overseas. And the newest hot local to grace the Crime Scene Investigator mantel is Riyadh. No, that is not entirely true, but that is exactly what The Kingdom feels like; a non-interesting formulaic yet technically well done procedural set in an exotic local (Riyadh) with a twist on the normal (terrorism).
All the technical qualities are there, acting, action, etc… But this film is boring at times, extremely predictable and devoid of any excitement or intrigue throughout its two hour running time. One of the things that makes it so boring is that it’s a completely fictional story. True all of Hollywood is fictional, hell every the true life movies are probably more fictional than true, but this doesn’t have any sense of realism what so ever with an ending that is purely only in Hollywood. What made Black Hawk Dawn so compelling was that it was based on a real story and the characters felt real.
The Kingdom starts off good, pulling on the heart strings and laying the foundation for a cast that one might care about, but once the sand and camel ratio soars the character development stops and the boring crime investigation starts. And the Jason Bateman character…I wish the terrorist would have won in that particular battle.
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