The Kingdom and Eastern Promises

I try to keep up with my tradition that Thursday night is the movie night. This is not always the case, depending on what I am playing. But the thing is, I never run of good movies to watch. NEVER!!!

So, tonight (technically, we are on Friday's morning) I watched 2 movies: The Kingdom and Eastern Promises.

THE KINGDOM

There is something about this movie that I didn't like. Agreed, this is a good action movie, but take care of this: action movie. Although this movie tries, very hard, to carry a message, it fails... Not miserably, but it still fails.

The movie is about a terrorist attack on a foreigners' compound in Saudi Arabia. This is followed by the trials of a FBI team to get on Saudi soil, until eventually they manage to do so, or there wouldn't have been a movie, duh!!!

I hate Jamie Foxx! The guy can't act. The rest of the cast was OK. But the Arab cast was a hit and miss. First of all, they all sounded like voice overs from Battlefield 2! But I have to mention that they spoke correct Arabic. Maybe not 100% correct, but better than any movie I have seen. Non Arabic movie, that is.

The 4 superheroes making up the FBI team land in SA and they start teaching the Saudis how to investigate and how to collect evidence. This is really absurd. This reminds me of the scene in Kingdom of Heaven when Balian started digging a well for the Arabs to irrigate their crops. Balian was a blacksmith from England who knew nothing about life in the desert, but still he taught them. The same Tarzan the Ape Man Complex...

The movie tries to be balanced, and it is better, much better, than, say, Munich at that. But still, it's biased! By the end of the first 10 or 15 minutes, I think a Western audience would be so angry of Saudis and Muslims in general that whatever you say during or at the end of the movie won't help change this image. Some effectively symbolic shots really grab a Western audience by the throat and scream at them for affection.

It's understandable that the director wishes to show the Saudi world to a Western audience who, presumably, know nothing about this world. While no parts of the movie were shot in Saudi Arabia, the movie tries to capture what it is to be in a Middle Eastern country. But unfortunately, this didn't go without its faults... For starters, the movie draws attention to the females dressed in traditional Saudi dress more than once. It should have been done only once. Most of the urban areas around the Western compound look like the people in there live in the 1980s or something. In fact like my friend Falcon said, it does look like a level cut from Call of Duty 4. The environments are dirty, gritty and looks like there was a war fought there not too long ago, even though nothing actually happened there, yet. They also remind me of the gritty environments of Black Hawk Down. But the thing I want to say is that, Middle Eastern countries do not like this, not anymore... And certainly not in a rich, actually ridiculously rich, country like SA. In many parts of the movie, I sensed disrespect to Muslims, but in other shots, the movie tries to show the audience some of the activities of Muslims in a respectable way. My guess is that the director wanted to show all the colours of the rainbow in his movie. But the fact remains that the movie shows more Muslim villains than it shows Muslim good guys!

The action sequences are nicely done and it looks that we are getting more and more movies (and games!) featuring combat in the Middle East. I mean, the audience has already seen action in jungles, forests, European beaches, Mars, bla, bla, bla. Now it's the desert's turn.

I was originally going to give this movie a 7, but there was a thing that made me chop off another point: stupid cinematography! I don't mean that the shots are bad, it's just the camera is too shaky! It's a nice effect in action sequences, but when you have 2 people talking to each other, why do you have to shake the camera? I got a headache watching this movie. It was a nice effect but overused.

Nothing will ever beat Lawrence of Arabia when it comes to a movie done by a Westerner about the Middle East.

6/10

EASTERN PROMISES

Now, that's a good movie! If you have seen, and liked, A History of Violence, you will like this movie a lot. It share the same atmosphere. I will get to that later. And if you haven't liked HoV... Why?!

The movie takes place in modern day London and involves the Russian mafia. I won't get into any plot details for fear of spoilers. The plot is not the most complex of plots but it's very good.

Now, what made this movie excellent was the atmosphere. Like in David Cornenberg's other movie, the mob is real. These people are real and they live like other people, well, sort of. The scenes where you have mob members setting with family, cooking, drinking, ... etc makes you believe that they are real. They are crazy, stylish people, but they are real. Some of the locations and scenes in this movie are pretty memorable too.

Acting is great, although Naomi Watts screen time is rather limited. Like HoV, again, this is a somewhat short movie. At about 100 minutes, I think it was a bit short. The other actors did a great job too. But I think HoV had better acting... After all, it had Ed Harris!

I recognized Howard Shore's music from the opening credits!!! As usual, he is great!

This is a highly recommended movie. Watch it ASAP.

8.5/10

EDIT: Part of the review of The Kingdom was edited from its original form. The reason for this is that I saw it was a bit unbalanced. And I did reference my friend, Falcon, who was the first to comment on this post.