You briefly mentioned two other movies which did well among the recent spate of Hollywood’s we-hate-the-war-on-terror symphony. I saw Vantage Point on DVD a month or so ago. It’s a good movie, intelligent and interesting, but it does its best to skate around the subject of the assassins being Muslims. They don’t pray to Mecca or anything like that, don’t speak in Arabic, don’t act in any way shape or form Muslim or Arab, except for one guy who’s a suicide bomber. There’s even a character among the good guys who turns out to be a traitor, and there’s no explanation of the betrayal. So the movie is pretty squeamish about Islamic terrorism, truthfully. The Kingdom is a better picture, in many ways. For one thing, the cast is superb. Jamie Foxx, Chris Cooper, Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman, and an Egyptian actor you never heard of named Ashraf Barhom are all terrific. Barhom is especially good, working well with Foxx especially, and you really feel for his character, trying to solve this terrorist crime and hold his country together while it’s splitting at the seams with violence and hatred. Each of the other characters is stellar: Cooper is wonderful as a bomb expert, Garner’s very good playing a forensic expert, Bateman’s good too. The interesting thing is the ending. I will try not to spoil this for those who haven’t seen the picture, but there’s no way I can do this without letting a little bit of the ending out. After the final confrontation (a violent chase and shootout, as well-done as I’ve seen in recent years) there are two scenes that are viewed alternatively, cutting back and forth. One is with the family of one of the bad guys, the other is between several of the protagonists. They both tell each other that they’ll kill all of the opposition, the implication being that the war on terror is really a Hatfields and McCoys sort of thing, where neither side can ever win, or stop.
I find all of this fascinating, frankly. Hollywood is full of prejudices. Frankly the ruling clique has a lot of contempt for the middle Americans who they make movies for. Those in the movie biz, in addition, despise TV and those who have to make a living working there, though they might say differently. One reason they despise it is the success of shows like Jerry Springer, 24, NCIS, the Unit, etc. None of these shows has had it’s movie counterpart since 9/11, and my guess is it won’t happen any time soon, because the movie studios are too squeamish about portraying Arabs as villains. To see an Arab terrorist as a bad guy, you have to go back to the Schwarzenegger vehicle True Lies (which also had an Arab good guy, ignored by those who criticized the movie for portraying all Arabs as terrorists). I am still waiting for something that portrays the cause of the people who want to destroy this country clearly, and without any squeamishness, as evil.
