Oh Christmas Eve...

The Kingdom(dir. Peter Berg)
More like The King-dumb. I'd imagine this film would be more offensive to individuals who easily get worked up by the war in Iraq, so I only found it to be mildly offensive. It exploits our current political climate to create action-movie thrills. It reaches it's apex of offensiveness in the beginning with some crazy jihad Muslims killing random American bystanders in Saudi Arabia. That doesn't sound all that offensive, but the tone employed to display these proceedings created a level of excitement that was simply inexcusable. I almost wanted to laugh at the horribly mismatched nature of the tone and what was happening onscreen. It, however, eventually settles on a more sober and less ridiculous tone. There's also the ending that tries to equate our American "bad ass" protagonists to the crazy Muslim zealots that we were supposed to be rooting for to die in probably the most obvious and clumsiest way possible, but you know, it shows that it's fair and balanced and stuff. It was vaguely involving at given moments and it didn't offend me too much with it's pro-American, kill all the Muslims attitude. It was also not as boring of a slog as the next film I'm reviewing. It was mediocre.
** out of ****
The Bourne Ultimatum(dir. Peter Greengrass)
The film above and this film have a lot in common in terms of aesthetics with their shaky camerawork and intense amount of editing. Both films shoot their action scenes in such a way that you can't make out what is happening and the audience is expected to get excited because of this lack of clarity. It's dumb. Dumb dumb dumb. The film above at least had a little humor, while this is just humorless and numbing. There was some vaguely affecting moments in the film above, while this film is just cold and so serious that it's impossible to have any fun or be emotionally involved with it in any way. The level of seriousness in the film above was at least a little bit understandable given that it was striving to be an action movie stripped from today's headlines, while this is just an action movie with a story that might be described as Mission: Impossible or James Bond with amnesia. I have never seen the previous two films in the series, but it's hard to imagine that seeing both beforehand would have made this a more enjoyable experience. People have also said that this could be the best film in the series so I can't imagine diving into the others anytime soon. If any critics think this is a fun little action movie, then it's pretty obvious that these critics must confuse excitement with boredom. The film is so serious that it's basically the equivalent of a comedian that would stop a gig if anybody dare laugh at one of his/her jokes. The film tries to be tense the whole time and fails miserably at trying to generate any suspense or audience involvement whatsoever. This is the future of action cinema? Fuck that. Take me back to the late 80's and early 90's immediately if that is true. It was bad. Bad bad bad.
*1/2 out of ****