Peter Berg (the young actor in The Last Seduction) takes the helm of this intelligent terrorist thriller produced by Michael Mann and set in Saudi Arabia.

It comes with the tagline 'how do you stop an enemy who isn't afraid to die', a comment on the fanaticism of extremist factions intent on causing serious harm to westerners and their ideals. Jamie Foxx plays US special agent Fleury, called up for a dangerous mission when things start going awry in Saudi.

A deadly attack involving bombs going off has taken place in an army base in Riyadh, and Fleury goes against orders to take a small expert detective team (played by Garner, Cooper and Bateman) into the bomb site with a secret one-week mission to crack the terrorist cell that carried out the mission. On the ground they get assistance from a sharp-witted Saudi captain of police (Ashaf Barhoum) but soon realize this will be a mission fraught with problems.

Although fictional, The Kingdom sets up an exciting scenario that addresses the current sense of tension between the Middle Eastern Muslim community and the West. The Saudi location is one rarely explored in a blockbuster so it seems fresh (locations in Phoenix Arizona being chosen to represent the sun-kissed surroundings of Saudi).

It will be interesting to see in which countries in the Middle East, this film gets a release. The film purports to be a thinking man's action thriller and on that basis, it works ok. The director/producers haven't gone for an all-out gung-ho approach which is welcome. After the initial terror aspect, much of the film is a considered and thoughtful detective build-up. You kind of realize that the tensions building behind closed doors, will boil over at some point as the detective team gets nearer to the dangerous terrorists behind the attack.

Encouragingly the film doesn't want to take sides and merely seeks to take a neutral stance suggesting there needs to be greater understanding on both sides and that's a healthy stance to take.

A weakness of the film is that it's quite wearing to watch - the camera jumps quickly, at times too quickly, from one scene to the next, so that it seems bewildering at times. Perhaps this is because the target audience is a young MTV crowd, but less cuts in the edits would have been an improvement. Also you don't get to hear all of the dialogue that's said - but you get to hear most of it and imagine that you perhaps don't need to hear all of it. It's a reasonable action thriller overall.