YMMV / The Kingdom (2007)

• Awesome Music: Finale. It would later be used in Rango.
• Common Knowledge: Several reviews of the movie called it a typical terrorist movie which happens to have one Arab movie character as a good guy, which ignores the roles of several supporting characters (such as Sergeant Haytham, Prince Ahmed, many of Faris’s minor subordinates and maybe even General Abdulmalik in a Well-Intentioned Extremist kind of way)
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Colonel Faris al Ghazi, the head Saudi investigator working with the American team, is generally considered to be the film's best character (some of its critics say he comes the closest to carrying it by himself) who embodies A Father to His Men, Rank Scales with Asskicking, and gets the most arc and development of the cast.
  • Grant the Southern-Fried Genius Mr. Fixit bomb expert played by Chris Cooper got singled out by some as the most entertaining of the American investigators. It helps that he's arguably the one who suffers the least from being a Fish out of Water.
  • Richard Jenkins as Badass Bureaucrat Director Grace cemented himself in many fans' memory with just three scenes.
  • Janine Ripon (one of the witnesses questioned about the attack) has a surprising amount of fans for such a minor character due to being a Nice Girl played by Ashley Scott.
• Homegrown Hero: There is a series of terror attacks in Saudi Arabia - and we follow a group of investigating US agents.
• Jerkass Woobie: Jackson. Yes, he is an angry uncooperative man who shows some racism to the Arabs, but he did just lose his wife in a terrorist attack and found his children standing over her body, confused and trying to put it back together.
• Retroactive Recognition: The film features Arab-Israeli actor Ashraf Barhom as a Saudi Royal Army intelligence officer, who would later achieve fame in the States as Jamal Al-Fayed in Tyrant (2014).
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Leavitt (played by Jason Bateman) gets the least to do during the actual investigation and instead gets a Plucky Comic Relief focus that many (although not all) viewers disliked and which could have been discarded in favor of giving serious focus on his Judaism and feelings of discomfort in the area. Notably, those scenes of Leavitt's which are the most liked are the ones where he's a Distressed Dude and getting to be a serious character.
  • Faris for some due to His death feeling like a less powerful statement than his survival would have in a movie which gave some focus and depth to the heroic Arab characters.

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