This would be geo-political thriller suffers mostly from a reluctance to be either geographically or politically enervated. Instead, director Peter Berg (part Paul Greengrass, part Michael Mann, all Michael Bay), opts for the thrill of big guns and bigger explosions. Why blow something up once when you can do it three times? Which is roughly what happens on a Western compound in Riyadh when Saudi militants slay American mums, dads and kids during a picnic. Then they send in a suicide bomber, and finish it off with an exploding ambulance. It’s scary stuff and surprisingly more shocking than nearly anything on the evening news, which takes some doing.

Where Berg, working from a Rambo-esque script by Matthew Carnahan, could have made worthwhile noise about the war of culture that is being fought across the Middle East, he gives us a variant on CSI: Saudi when clever Americans sneak in a crack forensic squad to break the case. It’s something of a neo-con wet-dream as FBI Agent Fleury and his hot-shot crew repeat the lessons Foxx learnt in Stealth. They’re not to be foiled by tricky Arab ways, there’s arse to kick and they plan kicking it hard. Fleury, who lost a good friend in the bombings, says as much at the start of the action.

Unlike The Bourne Ultimatum which makes no apologies for its pot-boiling presence, The Kingdom purports to be an examination of fundamentalism in between the carnage and sappy moralising. It says as much at the end of the action when a new generation of killers is born from the bloodbath of Fleury’s vigilantism. It also reveals that Americans do know the difference between a good Muslim and a bad one (Berg cuts between Fleury’s family and that of his Saudi offsider to underline the point – cue strings and slo-mo). But these vacant nods to the reality of vengeance is far too little, far too late. If one viewer’s dark mutterings of ‘annihilate the bastards’ was anything to go by, Berg’s coy message missed its mark entirely. And how could it be otherwise when rockets are trained on whities and Jennifer Garner has just stuck a knife in the groin of Arab scum? America – fuck yeah!

// COLIN FRASER