Kingdom, the

U.S. box-office takings provide interesting data for market analysis by knowledgeable analysts. They will know why the US$70-million military action-thriller The Kingdom, set in Saudi Arabia, grossed only US$45 million in theatres but amassed close to US$80 million in rentals.

Some may guess that it was the sort of movie appreciated by the sort of people who cannot afford to go to regular-priced cinemas.

Some will suspect an unusually good word of mouth, and it must be confessed that the movie is better than expected.

The action-adventure military-detective-procedural war movie covered a lot of ground in its dramatisation of real-life bombings on an American base in Saudi Arabia. It was one of newcomer Matt Carnahan's two screenplays to appear in 2007, when his star-studded (Cruise, Redford, Streep) Lions for Lambs also bombed at the box office (that Redford-directed political thriller, also focusing on the Middle East, grossed less than half of its US$35-million budget). The writer's good start in Hollywood (at the top, with some of the best) may have been helped by brother Joe Carnahan's track record (writing and directing Narc and Smokin' Aces).

Director Peter Berg had done well with his first feature in 1998, Very Bad Things, which he also wrote. The experienced movie actor subsequently directed an action adventure (The Rundown) and a sport epic (Friday Night Lights). The cast was strong too, headed by Jamie Foxx as the calmly forceful leader of a US army investigative team, assisted by a grizzly grunt (Chris Cooper), female forensics ace (Jennifer Garner) and foul-mouthed youngish character (Jason Bateman), enabling the producers to tick a bunch of demographic targets (blacks, middle-aged white blue-collar males, white wives and TV viewers). To attract discerning audiences, minor roles went to even stronger acting talents (Richard Jenkins, Jeremy Piven and Danny Huston).

Although filming was impossible in Saudi Arabia itself, location work in Arizona and Abu Dhabi provided convincing backdrops, as did a lot of ethnic Arab actors. The key one was Ashraf Barhom, a Galilee-born Arab-Israeli, engagingly credible as the American team's sympathetic liaison officer (leading to roles in Agora, Lebanon and Clash of the Titans). Another Arab-Israeli, Ali Suliman, was his assistant, a Morocco-born actor played an influential Saudi prince, and an Iraqi veteran actor portrayed lead plotter Abu Hamza. Even the stunts were fully professional, earning award nominations for their tricks of the multi-auto-crash trade.

Admirably, no sex scenes were squeezed into the plot. Melodramatics were limited to grieving family members and bonding soldiers. The editing, background music and sound effects helped to maintain a high level of edge-of-seatedness, and the screenplay didn't pander to anti-Muslim and/or anti-Arab post-9/11 audience prejudices. It acknowledged them, but incorporated an ironic set of opening and closing whispers designed to remind audiences that hatred and the desire for vengeance run two ways in a military campaign.

More astonishing, in terms of standard Hollywood gung-ho movies, the opening credits appeared over an outline history of the Saudi kingdom with relatively objective captions and images. Such an educational effort may have been wasted on many, but it's cheering to think that more than a handful of US renters (with pause buttons) may have paid closer attention than movie-goers could. One of the details that made The Kingdom seem way more worthy than expected.