General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The Kingdom (المملكة) (2007 film)

The Kingdom (المملكة) is a 2007 American action thriller directed by Peter Berg and written by Matthew Michael Carnahan, in which a team of FBI agents travels to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to investigate a terrorist bombing of a housing compound for Western oil workers.¹^•² Universal Pictures released it in Los Angeles and New York on September 28, 2007.¹

Key fact	Detail
Director / writer	Peter Berg; screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan¹
Producers / studio	Michael Mann and Scott Stuber for Universal Pictures¹
Release	Los Angeles and New York openings, September 28, 2007; rated R¹
Runtime	111 minutes (other listings give 109–110)¹^•³
Lead cast	Jamie Foxx, Chris Cooper, Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman, Ashraf Barhom¹
Key crew	Cinematographer Mauro Fiore; music by Danny Elfman; editors Kevin Stitt and Colby Parker, Jr.¹
Reception	51% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (186 reviews); Metascore 56 on Metacritic (37 reviews)⁴^•²

Spoilers

Plot and premise

The film opens with a terrorist attack on an American residential compound in Riyadh: attackers in a sport utility vehicle machine-gun families gathered at a picnic and baseball game, and a bomb detonated in the aftermath kills and wounds hundreds.⁵ FBI Special Agent Ronald Fleury (Jamie Foxx) assembles an elite team and negotiates a secret five-day trip into Saudi Arabia to find those responsible, over the objections of the State Department, which fears damage to the US–Saudi relationship.²^•⁶ Culture shock and opposition from local law enforcement hinder the Americans, but a sympathetic Saudi police captain, Colonel Faris Al Ghazi (Ashraf Barhom), becomes an ally.⁴

The team consists of forensic specialists Grant Sykes (Chris Cooper) and Janet Mayes (Jennifer Garner) and analyst Adam Leavitt (Jason Bateman), with Jeremy Piven as the State Department official Damon Schmidt and Danny Huston as a Washington politician.⁷^•¹ The investigation leads to a terrorist leader named Abu Hamza in Riyadh's Suwaidi district, and the film culminates in a heavily armed assault on a fortified terrorist compound.⁸^•³

Production

Berg, an actor turned filmmaker, worked from a script by Matthew Michael Carnahan; the story was inspired by the 1996 Khobar Towers terrorist attack, though the film's own opening is a fictional compound bombing.⁹^•⁵ Most scenes were shot in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, with additional filming in Washington and Arizona.¹⁰ According to a 2007 report, director Berg and producer Michael Mann tried, within the limits of the genre, to be accurate in their depiction of Saudi society, from details of dress to the rituals of family life.¹¹

The film opens with an animated sequence summarizing the history of US involvement in Saudi Arabia, including American oil interests, Osama bin Laden's opposition to US troops stationed in the kingdom during the Gulf War, the 1996 Khobar bombing, and the September 11 attacks, before moving to the fictional compound attack.¹²^•⁶

Reception

Critical response was mixed. On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 51% Tomatometer from 186 reviews, with an audience Popcornmeter score of 76% from more than 250,000 ratings; the site's critics consensus says the film provides several top-notch action scenes but "ultimately collapses under the weight of formula and muddled politics."⁴ Metacritic assigned a Metascore of 56 from 37 critic reviews, categorized as mixed or average, against a user score of 6.9.²

Reviewers divided over the same qualities. James Berardinelli of ReelViews called it smart and engaging, playing on fears of terrorism without feeling exploitative.² Jennie Kermode, writing for Eye for Film, described it as both a successful thriller and an intelligent culture-clash drama.¹² Philip French in The Guardian called it a poor contribution to films about American involvement in the Middle East, noting a frenetic style of rapid cutting and muttered dialogue.¹³ Anthony Lane in The New Yorker judged the film driven "not by logic but by simple needling," questioning the plausibility of sending a female forensic agent to a setting where the film says she is forbidden to touch Muslim bodies.⁷ The Japan Times read the film as an attempt to please everyone: a revenge thriller that also includes sympathetic Saudi police and a closing suggestion that the cycle of violence may not contain any solutions.¹⁴

Political interpretation and scholarship

The film attracted academic attention as an example of post-9/11 Hollywood geopolitics. A 2011 peer-reviewed article by S. Carter and Klaus Dodds, geographers at Royal Holloway, University of London, analyzed The Kingdom in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, arguing that the action-thriller genre carries political tendencies toward "Jacksonianism" and that the film's montage produces imaginative maps of connectivity related to the "extraterritorialities" of the war on terror.¹⁵

Saudi commentary was divided. A writer in Al-Riyadh newspaper described the unusual experience of seeing part of his country's recent history dramatized for American and European audiences, and noted that more than four years after the May 12, 2003 Riyadh bombings no Saudi book had yet analyzed the crisis from a Saudi perspective.¹⁶ Another Al-Riyadh piece praised the character of Colonel Faris Al Ghazi, played by Ashraf Barhom, as a charismatic Saudi figure with an intelligence and resolve usually reserved for American characters, while criticizing the film's reliance on Hollywood clichés elsewhere.¹⁷ A Saudi economic daily summarized the film's historical montage, including bin Laden's declaration of jihad over the presence of US forces, and observed that, as in most American films, the Americans are shown as the heroes who settle matters.⁶

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026