The best thing about “The Kingdom” may be its opening credits. A bracing race through nearly a century of images, sound bytes and clips from a variety of archival newscasts, interspersed with animated graphs and illustrations, it runs right through the Cold War, embargos in the 1970s, a range of invasions and occupations (both military and corporate), the rise of Osama Bin Laden and fades out on a grim, animated shot of an airliner cruising toward a shadowy pair of very tall towers. It’s an engaging and educational crash course in the details of the sociopolitical history that has led to the sorry state of conflict, misunderstanding and disharmony in the Middle East, and, specifically, the strained relationship between the kingdom of Saudi Arabia—the oil producingest country in the world—and the good ol’ U.S. of A., the oil consumingest country in the world.

The regrettable subtext, however—that the filmmakers assume their target audience needs this education—immediately establishes an unfortunate tone of condescension, one that could possibly be forgiven if the film moved forward to take any of the subsequent events it depicts seriously in any way. Turns out, however, it doesn’t.

The explosive first scene—a bloody and purely fictitious terrorist strike against a gated, “protected” U.S. civilian compound in Saudi Arabia—unfolds with a disturbing juxtaposition between the chaos and panic of the victims as they are blown up and mowed down by a squad of unknown assailants and the cold detachment of the attack’s architect, who watches coolly from a rooftop outside the perimeter with his grandchild on his knee.
Enter the FBI. The agents are charged with investigating any American death, on U.S. soil or otherwise, and they are determined to investigate the attack, take down its organizer and avenge the death of a comrade who fell among the hundreds killed. Attempting—but falling far short of—the same jokey professional camaraderie as the investigators from “The Fugitive,” the team is equal measures of C.S.I. and armed invasion force.

Initially refused access to the scene of the crime for purely diplomatic reasons, they cajole politicos, both American and Saudi, and, against the will and pride of both governments, manage eventually to wheedle their way in. Once on the ground overseas, they proceed to insult and threaten just about everyone they meet. Passionately clashing with U.S. representatives and their Saudi police escort alike, the team forces its way past any and all red tape in order to get the job done.

Although they are described as a well-trained and highly competent crew, the agents display an equally alarming disregard for the danger of their situation and the customs and intelligence of the Arabs they’re working with. In an embarrassing demonstration of American bravado, they bring flack jackets, but choose not to wear them as they deploy. The one female in the group (Jennifer Garner, in a thankless, one-dimensional, window-dressing role), apparently never bothered to read up on the finer points of traditional Arab garb, going about her business in a sweaty old tank-top against her hosts’ repeated requests that she cover up in front of the men. As backward as it may seem to U.S. sensibilities, these points serve only to illustrate how rude and thoughtless Americans can be in the face of foreign cultures.

It would be fair to say that Jamie Fox, playing the team’s leader, is one of Hollywood’s best and most varied talents. An accomplished comedian with an equivalent flair for music, his dramatic film performances (“Collateral,” “Ray”) have rarely failed to surprise. The sad surprise here is how dead-on he can imitate Denzel Washington when he’s told to do so, reducing the lead character to a shouting, snarling caricature of American ignorance and bluster. The relationship he eventually forms with the tough-as-nails Saudi commander enlisted to protect his team could have been parlayed into a significant comment on the balance of good people solving problems in different ways. But no. As the movie progresses, their bond actually contracts into a pat buddy-cop retread. Too bad.

Having introduced the Arab characters on both sides of the fence, the movie seems intent on depicting these people as fully capable of wearing black or white hats, but it also goes to some length to show that the ones in white hats will still torture and kill even their own if they feel a situation warrants such an extreme. The film also makes repeated attempts to indicate how all this violence can affect the children on both sides, so often left parentless and confused, but never seems to reach any resolution to their plight. At one early point, the film shows the wide-eyed orphan of the FBI team’s fallen friend in Washington, only later to see a young Saudi girl watch her whole family gunned down by FBI bullets. It could be conceded that the frequent thematic contradictions reflect the confounding state of affairs in the region, but that would arguably be giving the filmmakers here an awful lot more credit than they deserve.

Any serious political statement that director Peter Berg (‘The Rundown’) might be attempting here is swiftly blasted to bits in a hail of gunfire and grenades. As if he hadn’t destroyed enough S.U.V.s and architecture in the first hour of the flick, his third act devolves even further into a sorry approximation of an average Point-of-View shoot-em up video game. Featuring a kind of faceless enemy target practice we haven’t seen since Rambo hung up his M-60, the most salient shock evident here is that the present threats of global terrorism could so soon, and so effectively, be reduced to this level of empty, gung-ho exploitation.