IN THIS 'KINGDOM,' VIOLENCE RULES DESPITE TACKED-ON MORAL.

Byline: GLENN WHIPP 

>FILM CRITIC

We all know about the "CSI Effect," a syndrome produced by Jerry Bruckheimer's TV franchise that now has people apparently believing that ironclad evidence can be gathered and tested in a matter of -- oh -- minutes (60), an instantaneous process that produces absolute results. Mystery solved. Case closed.

The politically minded head-knocker "The Kingdom" takes the "CSI Effect" and applies it to the hunt for terrorists, positing that if we really want to find Osama bin Laden, all we need to do is drop a crack team of FBI investigators into the Middle East, wait five days and then -- presto, chango, Rambo -- bin Laden be dead.

That kind of magical thinking makes "The Kingdom" as big a fantasy as "The Jane Austen Book Club." But that doesn't mean it isn't effective in its own way, as Berg, borrowing more than a bit of style from Michael Mann (on board as a producer), creates a rock-'em, sock-'em action movie that is unapologetic in its ethos of butt-kicking revenge.

The primary butt-kicker here is FBI agent Ronald Fleury (Jamie Foxx), who leads a small team of Ray-Ban-wearing investigators into Saudi Arabia after terrorists slaughter scores of Americans inside an oil company compound. The namby-pamby State Department forbids American intrusion upon Saudi soil, but somehow Fleury and three fellow agents (played by Jennifer Garner, Chris Cooper and Jason Bateman) win a five-day exemption to pick through the rubble.

For the first hour or so, the push-pull dynamic is a familiar one, pitting Fleury against State Department bureaucrats (Jeremy Piven turns up in a nice, comic cameo) and Saudi military investigators.

Fleury is initially hamstrung by his escort, Colonel Al Ghazi (Ashraf Barhom) who, it turns out, is a loving family man (see, not all Muslims are bad) and desperately wants to exact revenge as well.

Even though Fleury and company have only minutes at the various crime sites, they manage to make Gil Grissom and Mac Taylor look like boot-dragging amateurs. You get the feeling that Berg ("The Rundown") doesn't really have his heart in the procedural stuff, though. You can almost feel the breeze from his sigh of relief once the tires screech and the bullets start to fly.

Berg's obvious enthusiasm for the boom-boom makes the movie's tacked-on moral ring false. If the endless cycle of violence is such a bad thing, why do guys like Berg get off on it? We don't go to "The Kingdom" to sort through philosophical conundrums. It's an exercise in wish fulfillment, and a bloody potent one at that.

Glenn Whipp, [phone]

[e-mail]

THE KINGDOM - Three stars

>R: graphic violence, language.

>Starring: Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner.

>Director: Peter Berg.

>Running time: 1 hr. 50 min.

>Playing: Area wide.

>In a nutshell: "CSI" goes to Saudi Arabia in this brutally effective revenge fantasy.

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Investigators played by Jennifer Garner, left, Ali Suliman, Jamie Foxx and Chris Cooper are on a tight deadline in their effort to get to the bottom of a deadly explosion in Saudi Arabia in "The Kingdom."