I can’t remember when a big action movie provoked so many sniggers and sneers in advance as this one. Pearl Harbor? The story goes that poor Peter Berg thought he was directing an action film with a brain and the good liberal message of “Let’s not be beastly to the Arabs” – and bloodthirsty preview audiences in America have been whooping and hollering “Hooray, USA!” whenever an Arab baddie is blown away. It’s the kind of high-minded liberal gaffe that the American journalist Tom Wolfe would no doubt dub “radical sheik”.

For this, Berg – best known in this country for his acting role opposite Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction – has only himself to blame. The film’s prologue gives us a potted history, through newsreels and charts, of the dubious oil-based links between the USA, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and terrorism. Here we go: smart, savvy thriller on the way, we think. Once the history lesson is over, however, we get a very different film. It’s not Syriana with more explosions and a higher body count, but a tense crime thriller: CSI goes to Saudi Arabia.

The Kingdom begins with a baseball game at a guarded American compound of oil workers in Riyadh. A sudden terrorist attack leaves hundreds dead and many more wounded. One of the dead is an FBI agent, and her colleagues back in the USA want to fly out to help solve the case. The Saudis don’t want it, the American government doesn’t want it, but special agent Ronald Fleury (Jamie Foxx) and his crack FBI team – an explosives expert, Grant Sykes (Chris Cooper); a forensics ace, Janet Mayes (Jennifer Garner); and an intelligence analyst, Adam Leavitt (Jason Bateman) – make a secret trip to Saudi Arabia to find those responsible.

In a race against time – they have only five days – the team turn up at the crime scene and find their hands tied by their Saudi minder, Colonel Al Ghazi (Ashraf Barhom), who resents their intrusion. Whereas the Americans resort to the appliance of science in tracking the killers, the Saudis go in for a little old-fashioned torture. To add to the tension, the FBI team are a target for the next terrorist attack. One clue leads to another and, in the final 40 minutes, the action changes gear and races towards a glorious eruption of exploding cars and exploding terrorists.

This is a film produced by Michael Mann, and it has the trade-mark of his slick, character-driven crime capers. Berg has shot it like a docudrama, which gives us an intimacy with the people and events. Okay, it’s your basic detective-hunts-criminal scenario, but what gives it an interesting twist is that the FBI team faces an unusual kind of obstacle: here, they must battle with the dictates of custom. We get a study of a culture clash between a test-tube-toting bunch of secular western professionals and a form of Islam that regards such people as interfering, foul-mouthed infidels, insensitive to their deepest religious convictions. Can such cultural differences be overcome in time to catch the bad guys? Slowly, Ghazi and Fleury realise that what they have in common is more important than what divides them. Both are regular guys, family men, dedicated professionals who want peace.

Appealingly, Berg takes you inside the Saudi way of life to a degree that few films ever do. Poor old Hollywood: if it resorts to standard views of Arabs, everyone complains of stereotypes; if it tries to show them as humans like us, it is accused of the sin of “moral equivalence”, by which is meant that it’s being soft on terrorists, which this film actually isn’t.

Berg has assembled a collection of fine actors, but whenever I see Foxx in a role like this, I can’t help but think, ‘I bet they tried, and failed, to get Denzel Washington.’ Foxx is always competent, but never inspired. And having someone as good-looking as Garner as an FBI boffin is bound to provoke cynicism, though this is to assume that professional women of a scientific bent must look like Dr Frankenstein to be authentic. Cooper is at his laconic best, but the man who really steals the show is Barhom, giving a nuanced and moving performance as the decent colonel. There may not be much in the way of food for thought here, but as a gripping cop story, it’s a triumph.

15, 109 mins

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