At the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, the audience for the special preview of The Kingdom divides neatly into two. At the back sit the members of the international press, essentially European, there for their first glimpse of Universal’s new $70m action thriller. Down the front, recruited from the tourist throng mooching over the star footprints on Hollywood Boulevard, are the representatives of Joe Public – a young cross-section of modern America.

The Kingdom, starring Jamie Foxx, Chris Cooper and Jennifer Garner, tells the story of a group of FBI agents sent to Saudi Arabia to collar the perpetrators of an Al-Qaeda-style bombing of an American worker compound. Trailed heavily, the film has been the cause of much media interest in the USA, not just for the grisly news that three crew members died while making it but also for the fact that its release has been delayed by a whole year, such has been the concern about the volatility of its subject matter.

“The American public is certainly not as educated as it could be about the realities of the Middle East,” says the film’s director, Peter Berg. “I’ve been surprised how very few Americans understand that Osama Bin Laden is a Saudi, that 15 of the 19 in the planes that knocked down the Trade towers and the Pentagon were Saudi. When you’re this comfortable, there’s not enough motivation to understand politics. It’s much easier to read about Lindsay Lohan.”

Mindful of the sensitivities, Berg has prefaced his film with a three-minute history lesson, a computer-animated sequence that charts Saudi-Western relations from the discovery of oil in the 1930s through to the cataclysmic events of September 11, 2001. At this particular screening, though, as the introduction concludes with the image of an airliner gliding towards the towers and a respectful fade to black, the reverential, pin-drop silence in the cinema is punctured by a gleeful “ba-boom” from the auditorium.

“I’ve heard different reactions: silence; I’ve heard people gasp; I’ve heard someone scream out, ‘F***’,” groans Berg. “But ba-boom?” On screen, as Foxx’s posse gets increasingly medieval on the local evil-doers, the front-of-house whooping at every American bullet – and there are an awful lot of them – seems as much the New World’s riposte to Old Europe as it is a visceral response to the story.

As has been reported in recent weeks, we are about to face a wave of films whose histories are tied up with the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan: In the Valley of Elah, Grace Is Gone, Lions for Lambs, Rendition, Stop Loss and Redacted, which has just won the Silver Lion at Venice. That they have all conspired to arrive around now is perhaps unsurprising, given the cumbersome four or five years it takes to get a movie from the marketing seminar into the cinemas, their very nature making them tremendously unresponsive to the unfolding of current affairs. “Rule number one: don’t chase headlines,” growls Michael Mann, The Kingdom’s veteran producer, whose love of high-minded material (The Insider, Ali) seems counterbalanced by a passion for semi-automatic weaponry (Heat, Miami Vice).

On this count, The Kingdom would appear to be a whole case of ammo apart from its rivals, having its origins not in the Iraq invasion but in the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers complex, which claimed 19 American lives and wounded 400 others. Back then, according to the memoir My FBI, by former bureau director Louis Freeh, US law enforcers had been keen to get in to assist the Saudi investigators, only to be rebuffed by the ruling royals, who did not want to appear to be losing control. By the time permission was granted, the critical first 72 hours had elapsed.

“Freeh was talking about these acts not as acts of terrorism but just as murders,” says Berg, “and I thought it sounded like an interesting premise for a film, one that is not politically motivated: to base a homicide investigation in a foreign and unwelcoming environment. Saudi Arabia, being the strictest Muslim country in the world, seemed like a good one.” Or, as writer Matthew Michael Carnahan puts it, taking a group of police officers “and putting them on Mars”.

In The Kingdom, the fictitious but very plausible atrocity is the suicide bombing of a compound in Riyadh (similar attacks happened there in 2003), in which the deaths of 100 or so American workers, slaughtered while playing baseball and the like, must be avenged, if not judicially, then at the point of one of Mann’s beloved M16s. Of course, its makers deny any John Wayne leanings. “It’s not a jingoistic Team America Destroys Paris movie,” defends Mann. Neither is it, adds Berg, “a bloodthirsty, pro-American sense of, ‘Let’s go and kill some f***in’ Arabs.’ It’s not. It’s truly not”.

Try telling that to the enthusiastic early reviewers and patriotic bloggers (“In a season sure to be dominated by Meryl Streep movies about the war, it was nice to see one that actually bothered to have us as the good guys,” reads one). Preview audiences have been equally yee-ha (“The numbers were so high that the studio was confused,” says Berg). Which suggests that, for all Hollywood’s liberal posturing, the American public might just be a bit tired of all that self-flagellation and prefer to have a good old-fashioned, guilt-free crack at the baddies.

The reaction seems to have caused more than a little soul-searching for Berg, a man who spent months in Saudi Arabia undertaking his sympathetic research, but who is finding that his intended evenhanded picture is being read as a gung-ho thrill ride, or at least one whose progressive sentiment amounts to just a bit of topping and tailing. “Message films don’t work,” adds Mann, somewhat undercutting Berg’s finale, which seems to suggest – rather richly – that violence only begets more violence.

Indeed, Berg has since expressed regret about choosing a patriotic, heroic outcome for his film over several bleaker alternatives. “I do think it’s not entirely realistic,” he apologises. “I boxed myself into a corner. Next time that won’t happen.” Like it or not, he seems to have made the first war-on-terror film simply to accept the conflict as an unchangeable reality, the backdrop for a buddy cop flick – CSI: Riyadh.

Funny that the test screening, the one that clinched it for the studio – playing the film before its potentially most hostile audience – took place in the mean streets of... Wandsworth. If the specially invited Muslim traditionalist crowd of South London-istan could take it, the theory went, everywhere else would be a doddle.

“We had an incredible screening,” Berg recalls. “We very concerned that we were perhaps going to have a more negative reaction than we wanted. But the cheering and laughing and clapping that was there in the American audience was all there, and then some, in London.” Afterwards, a focus group was asked to explain why they had rated the film “excellent” on their score-cards. “A Muslim woman put her hand up – full head covering, the robe. She leaned forward and said, ‘Kick-ass action.’”

How The Kingdom plays in Saudi Arabia will have to remain a matter of conjecture. There are no cinemas there.

— The Kingdom opens on Friday

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