Director Peter Berg is trying for something very different in The Kingdom, and the end result is fascinating to watch on-screen, and well worth thinking about after. Berg's other films have all been spins on familiar genres, some more successful than others. Very Bad Things was a stab at bleak black comedy; The Rundown put fresh energy and effort into the tired buddy film; Friday Night Lights turned standard-issue sports film themes and scenes into a brisk, bracing portrait of small-town America. Now, with The Kingdom, he's taking the suspense and structure of a forensic police procedural and putting it on the world stage. After a terrorist attack on a Western oil-company compound in Saudi Arabia -- perfectly structured by Berg as a cascading series of nightmares that go from bad to worse to awful -- that leaves hundreds dead, FBI agent Ronald Fleury (Jamie Foxx) is insistent that the FBI be allowed to put boots on the ground in Saudi Arabia, despite the insistence of the Saudi and American governments that any such deployment would be politically untenable for both parties.

These are not the concerns of your standard action-flick, but from the jump The Kingdom makes a different class of ambitions and aspirations strikingly clear: The opening credit sequence covers historical highpoints from 1932 (the founding of modern Saudi Arabia) to 1974 (the OPEC oil embargo) to 2001 (the 9-11 attacks, where 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens). There's a difference between background and backdrop, though, and I was glad to see that The Kingdom's Saudi setting isn't just left as a concern for the production design and costuming teams; it's woven into every moment of the film. It would have been easy to have The Kingdom take place in some fictional nation-state, and Berg and screenwriter Matthew Carnahan deserve credit for guts as opposed to taking the easy way out; when The Kingdom does feel thinly-drawn, perhaps that just confirms that the complex nature of Saudi society and our co-dependent relationship with it can't be fit onto the screen within a two-hour span.



And if The Kingdom does offer bitter pills to swallow, it's also smart enough to offer a little action-flick sugar to help them go down. Fleury's team includes a forensic expert (Jennifer Garner), a bomb expert (Chris Cooper) and an intelligence analyst (Jason Bateman). Bateman's Adam Leavitt provides unforced comedic relief throughout, often with nothing more than his casual-yet-stressed demeanor. Early on, Leavitt's not crazy about being on the plane to Riyadh, prompting Fleury to question his earlier desire to get the FBI in on the investigation. Leavitt makes it clear that while he wanted to see the Bureau involved, he may not have necessarily meant himself: "I didn't say 'I,' I said 'FBI.'" In Riyadh, the team are escorted -- coddled and confounded and baby-sat, mostly - by Colonel Al Ghazi (Ashraf Barhom), a local cop who's losing sight of why he does what he does.

I've always been of the opinion that crime movies function as sociology, whether deliberately or not -- what better way to understand a society than by watching what happens when it's broken? And Matthew Carnahan's script isn't afraid to criticize both Saudi Arabia and the U.S.A. Fleury's team is blocked and baffled at every turn -- they're told they can't even touch the bodies of any Muslim dead, for example, which makes fingerprinting the dead perpetrators tough. The Saudis don't want them there, despite the hospitality and platitudes of the ruling class; the State Department doesn't want the FBI team there, personified by Jeremy Piven as a diplomat who, apparently, does not know the meaning of the word 'diplomatic.' Before the Prince visits the FBI team, Piven takes one look at Garner's t-shirt-clad form and scrambles for a shawl so he can sanitize the grip-and-grin photo op: "We need to cover these situations."

And so it goes for the whole film: Our heroes are caught between the traditions and theology of a medieval monarchy and the bloodlust and barbarism of pious psychopaths. Desperate to be allowed to do something, anything, Fleury has to beg his local minders for free reign: "America's not perfect; not at all. I'm the first to admit it. But we are good at this." It's nice to hear this kind of humility spoken out loud from a Hollywood film (actually, it would be nice to hear that kind of humility spoken out loud from the White House, too). Fleury and Al Ghazi are soon united as kindred spirits -- there's a great moment late in the film, almost like something torn from a Western, where Fleury and Al Ghazi both turn on an armed assailant and -- despite their cultural differences and philosophical disagreements -- their guns speak as one.

And that split -- between cross-cultural drama full of subtitles and subtexts and action that speaks in the universal language of ballistics and bullets -- both makes and mars The Kingdom. Without the cat-and-mouse police procedural material, The Kingdom would be Syriana-lite; without the facts and figures and vignettes about life in Saudi Arabia, The Kingdom would be CSI in a slightly warmer climate. Still, the two halves of The Kingdom have an uneasy relationship -- much like Saudi Arabia and The United States, come to think of it. And the constant barrage of concepts, ideas, snapshots of life in Saudi Arabia and glimpses of geopolitical and economic concerns mean you can't simply sit back and let the stunt work wash over you. As The Kingdom came to a close, I was torn between two possible future courses of action: Part of me was contemplating buying a ticket to see The Kingdom again and part of me was contemplating selling my car -- both options giving me the opportunity to vote with my dollar in more ways than one. Berg has a handle on the muscular action stuff -- the film's final showdown/throwdown makes it clear that Berg has studied producer Michael Mann's Heat fairly avidly -- and as cliché (or, more charitably, classic) some of The Kingdom's plot points can be, the climactic action sequence also has a frantic sense of grim possibility, where you can sense the rough shape of events without necessarily knowing precisely what will happen next.

And when the shooting's done, in the scene where a conventional action film would set up the sequel or seal the film, The Kingdom does something completely unexpected: It surprises you, wrapping the quiet after the bomb blasts and gunshots with grim whispers that, uttered worlds apart, echo each other as quiet, accursed prophecy. The Kingdom doesn't work as a pure drama -- but it'll have a much better audience than any pure drama could; The Kingdom's too ambitious and sprawling to just be an action film -- but that ambition elevates it above the majority of cookie-cutter action flicks. From bloody opening to bleak coda, The Kingdom pulls off something unexpected and unsettling: It's a popcorn movie that leaves the taste of ashes in your mouth.