September 30, 2007 -- This movie winds up being a straight-out detective shoot-em-up story, despite the elaborate political, cultural and social trappings at the bookends. Some will find this fact disappointing, others will be relieved. It depends on what you want out of this movie. Once it gets going in the second act, it has plenty of headlong action with bullets, bombs and grenades going off all over the place. Is this movie realistic at all? I have no idea, but I did find myself caught up in the action and emotion of it.

Directed by Peter Berg, there are a lot of tie-ins to his earlier action film “Smokin' Aces,” but it does a good, careful job of setting up the story, namely explaining what the heck an FBI team is doing in Saudi Arabia in the first place. It does have an explanation, involving a back story about the death of a former team member and carefully applied political pressure to facilitate the team's arrival on foreign soil. The film also carefully lays the foundation for the cultural and political friction encountered by the team. The Saudi royal family wants the FBI kept at arms length for political reasons. The U.S. State Department wants the same thing for similar reasons. The Saudi Royal Family's hold on power is tenuous and its ties to the Americans are unpopular. The Royal Family is one of the few allies that America has in the Middle East. The history of Saudi Arabia is outlined in a brief review at the beginning of the film.

The FBI team leader is Ronald Fleury (Jamie Foxx of “Dreamgirls”) a smart, politically saavy operator, who is ably assisted by Grant Sykes (Chris Cooper of “Breach”), a smart, hands-on investigator with a laid-back style. Team member Janet Mayes (Jennifer Garner of “Catch and Release”) has a very personal score to settle with the bombers who killed her old flame, along with a hundred or so Saudis and Americans in a heavily-guarded compound. Another investigator on the team is Adam Leavitt (Jason Bateman of “Smokin' Aces”). The attack on the compound was carried out with military precision, using gunmen wearing Saudi military uniforms, a suicide bomber and a car bomb, all calculated to kill the most Americans possible. The FBI team has only five days to find out who planned the attack and catch them.

The FBI team at first is prohibited from investigating the crime scene. They can't touch anything and they can't leave the compound without permission from the Saudis. Another hinderance is an annoying U.S. State Department official, Damon Schmidt (Jeremy Piven of “Smokin' Aces”), who tries to get the team to leave the country. Fleury and his team find a way to grease the political wheels for their full involvement in the investigation. They are aided by a Saudi, Colonel Faris Al Ghazi (Ashraf Barhom of “Paradise Now”) who is supposed to be their bodyguard and babysitter during their brief stay. Fleury and Al Ghazi learn to respect and trust each other and soon become full partners in the investigation. The rest of the story is how the team cracks the case and gets the bad guys despite all the problems they encounter. It is basic police work, plus a kind of “CSI” approach to evidence. The action portion of the movie is intense, filled with bombs, bullets and rocket-propelled grenades. A sombre epilog predicts this cycle of violence will continue.

This movie works mainly because of the well-developed relationship between the key characters, Fleury, Sykes, Mayes and Faris Al Ghazi. These characters ooze chemistry and confidence. Sykes seems happiest wallowing in a muddy pit, the bomb crater at the center of the investigation. Faris Al Ghazi, a born cop, enjoys working with his network of sources, and is cool under fire. Fleury is a born leader and shows amazing skill working with people of all cultures. This movie is about the nitty gritty of police work. It is about how good cops work a case, but it is also about history, politics and culture wars. Sure, it has its logical gaps, and it can be seen as over simplistic both politically and procedurally, but overall, it is a better than average detective and political thriller. It is more thoughtful than many films in this genre. It rates a B.

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Copyright © 2007 Robert Roten. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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