Dir. Peter Berg. US, 110 mins.
The Kingdom , about terror against Americans in Saudi Arabia, will confirm some of the worst American prejudices about the Middle East - that most Arabs there hate the US, and that America could eliminate threats there if bureaucrats got out of the way and if a few good men (and a woman) went in with the gloves off and guns ablaze. You can guess who comes out on top in this action movie.

Jamie Foxx and Jennifer Garner as FBI agents bring star power to the heavy firepower here, as does Jeremy Piven, playing a US diplomat intent on avoiding friction with four thousand Saudi princes.

Like it or not, US audiences will welcome a movie like this with vengeance at its core. The mission depicted in the film is the slam dunk (albeit smaller) that the Iraq invasion was supposed to be.

The non-stop action and topicality are enough to make it work in most foreign territories. The stars and the instability of the Middle East for the foreseeable future should make the The Kingdom strong on the shelf.

The saga opens with a bloody and grimly believable attack on a baseball game in a fortified oil company compound filled with Americans. The tour de force action sequence begins as a wild drive-by shooting, and ends with a huge bang when an ambulance tending to the wounded turns out to be booby-trapped. As Saudis torture the suspects, the FBI gets the clear in Washington to send in a diverse four-person team, Sgt. Fury-style, with Special agent Fleury (Jamie Foxx) in the lead, a stunning female agent (Jennifer Garner), a redneck bomb expert (Chris Cooper) and a goofy tech-head (Jason Bateman).

The FBI strategy is such pure Americana that screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan could have cribbed it from Mark Twain - Foxx charms his stern Saudi babysitters with humour and Truman-esque talk, and can-do Cooper shows he's willing to get his hands dirty, CSI-style, crawling through the mud to find evidence, all within a day or two.

Revenge comes when the crew survives an attack on the highway at more than 100 mph, with director Peter Berg revelling in conflagration once again. Bateman is taken prisoner and the three agents race to the terrorists' lair, where they shoot up the congested neighbourhood, and hand-to-hand fighting gets as nasty as the initial attack that set it all in motion.

The FBI agents in Kevlar vests dodge every bullet, while countless men in local garb and Saudi uniforms die, all of it thrown in your face by DP Mauro Fiore's handheld camera. Avenging a massacre hasn't been this easy since Rambo. The lesson here is clear - Americans like these would have found Osama Bin Laden by now.

Direction by Peter Berg gets the crescendos right (with constant high-speed car convoys transplanted from producer Michael Mann's universe), and acting by the FBI quartet is pro forma for the new crop of desert action movies. Ashraf Barhom (Paradise Now) is the surprise here, poignant as the Saudi police colonel who bucks local prejudices and ends up befriending the team.

Working in Arizona and Abu Dhabi, production designer Tom Duffield hits the right notes with details of war on terror in cities that rise up from the sand.

To Carnahan's credit, his script doesn't confuse winning this battle with winning the war. Instead, it warns that America's next war in the Middle East might just be with its ally and oil source.

Director
Peter Berg

Production Companies/Backers
Relativity Media (US)
Forward Pass (US)
Stuber/Parent (US)

US Distributor
Universal (US)

Producers
Michael Mann
Scott Stuber

Executive Producers
Mary Parent
Steven Saeta
Sarah Aubrey
John Cameron
Ryan Kavanaugh

Co-Producer
K. C. Hodenfield

Screenplay
Matthew Michael Carnahan

Cinematographer
Mauro Fiore

Editors
Kevin Stitt
Colby Parker, Jr.

Music
Danny Elfman

Production Design
Tom Duffield

Main Cast
Jamie Foxx
Chris Cooper
Jennifer Garner
Jason Bateman
Ashraf Barhom
Ali Suliman
Jeremy Piven