`Kingdom' fades off into cliches.

Byline: Jim Keogh

COLUMN: Movie Review

"The Kingdom'' opens with a montage of images and text describing the United States' tangled history with Saudi Arabia. The intro sets the stage for a thinking-man's picture about the Middle East where the volatile mix of politics, economics and religion so often alchemizes into violence. Here's a movie that will ask difficult questions about our queasy relationship with a country that can't quite seem to make up its mind if it's friend or foe.

But "The Kingdom'' never lives up to the promise of those first few minutes.

Instead, director Peter Berg and writer Matthew Michael Carnahan supply us with a relatively routine police thriller involving a team of FBI agents who make a secret trip to Riyadh, where they're given only five days to learn who conducted a brutal suicide-bombing, bullet-spraying attack on a group of American oil workers during their company picnic.

The agents are treated as interlopers. The thinly veiled hostility and suspicion etched on the faces of their Saudi hosts reveals that the mission will be a rocky one - a post-9-11 version of Sidney Poitier venturing into the inhospitable Deep South to investigate the murder of a white woman in "In The Heat of The Night.''

The team is led by Ronald Fleury (Jamie Foxx), a hard-driving cop who wants to bulldoze the layers of protocol that hamstring his investigation. He's accompanied by a mild-mannered explosives expert (played by the ever-reliable Chris Cooper), a forensic pathologist (Jennifer Garner) and a wisecracking computer nerd (Jason Bateman). The characters are all easily discernible "types'' from numerous cop pictures, none of them especially memorable as they bellyache about their inability to work around local law enforcement's rules of engagement and jurisdiction. Until the final firefight, one of their staunchest adversaries is a weaselly U.S. diplomat (Jeremy Piven). They are fortunate to find a sympathetic ear in Saudi Colonel Al-Ghazi (Ashraf Barhoum), who helps them navigate Saudi politics - which includes making nice with a prince - to set them on the trail of the deadly terrorist cell responsible for the murders. Al-Ghazi is the most compelling, complex character in a movie that seems to have had both adjectives surgically removed.

The final third of the movie is a "Blackhawk Down''-like battle, with the team pinned in a hostile neighborhood that crawls with armed terrorists who seem to occupy every rooftop, every open window. The action is choreographed well enough, certainly bloody, but the film loses any pretense of seriousness when the scientist and the ordnance guy grab rifles and start picking off baddies with the efficiency of Rambo. (One of the team is subjected to horrendous beatings and emerges with only minor abrasions applied by a makeup artist with a light touch.)

"The Kingdom'' is a case of diminished expectations. If you anticipate nothing more than some tense cross-cultural confrontations punctuated by gunfire, then you'll like it fine. If you want to see a movie that will challenge your thinking about how the fortunes of the U.S. intersect with those of the Middle East, rent "Syriania.''

`The Kingdom'

**

A Universal Pictures release

Rating: R for intense sequences of graphic, brutal violence and language

Running time: 1 hour and 50 minutes

ART: PHOTO

CUTLINE: From left, Jennifer Garner, Ali Suliman, Jamie Foxx and Chris Cooper in "The Kingdom."