Peter Berg, director of Very Bad Things and actor in such films as Smokin’ Aces, Collateral, and The Great White Hype, gets behind the camera again, this time emulating master Michael Mann’s own visual style in a brilliant FBI crime drama embedded deep within foreign soil in The Kingdom, a film about a crack team of agents that hits Saudi Arabian sand to uncover the mad militant strategist behind a horribly brutal orchestration that left one FBI agent dead.

At its heart, The Kingdom is a film about two cultures diametrically opposed in political philosophy, religion, and social norms that must work together to ferret out the radical Muslim fundamentalist behind an attack on an small American community in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Spurred by the recent attack Special Agent Ronald Fleury (played by Jamie Foxx), who has a knack for talking himself into and out of any given situation, maneuvers his political chess pieces, navigating bureaucratic red tape and assembles an elite group of FBI field operatives — Grant Sykes (Chris Cooper), Janet Mayes (Jennifer Garner), and Adam Leavitt (Jason Bateman) — to travel to Riyadh and find out who planned the strike that killed their friend, all in the limited time span of a week.

The dialogue between the American agents is funny, heartwarming, and sad at different moments in the film. Fleury’s three surrogates all play up their platonic bonds to different laughs throughout the film, each getting time to shine with one-liners and put downs. But this isn’t a comedy, and Fleury is no straight man. He’s a hard line agent who’ll try to do things by the book as much as possible, but often realizes that task (like getting into Saudi Arabia) requires the book to be tossed out once in awhile.

The standout performance of the film may be from actor Ashraf Barhom, who plays Colonel Faris Al Ghazi, the Saudi state police officer ordered to protect the American agents while they’re in Riyadh. Barhom progresses from a cold, distant police officer to the Americans’ warm, intelligent companion, even risking his life to save them. Al Ghazi faces resistance from his people when he takes on the task of protecting the Americans, but owns up to the job.

If you’re not going to the movies for characters and acting chops, don’t be afraid. The Kingdom delivers two big money shots for the action-adventure junky. The film opens with the terrorist attack on Riyadh’s American community, when two gunmen and a suicide bomber wreck havoc, and later, when a subsequent attack lays waste to the rescue efforts. Berg slows the pace down considerably, as Fleury and his team finds its way into Riyadh and must accommodate the requests of the Saudi government to obey them and respect their Muslim traditions (including respecting the dead and covering up Jennifer Garner’s boobs in the presence of the prince).

The second action sequence is the penultimate start to the end, when the terrorist cell executes an attack on the military convoy carrying the Americans. The pace heightens when a suicide car bomb sets off a domino effect of multiple car crashes and SUV rollovers, prompting a fire fight to ensue between the Saudi/American contingent and the terrorists in a raucous action sequence that deftly emulates any Michael Mann shootout, before collapsing into a three-way car chase into a not-so-nice neighborhood in Riyadh. Once the team locates their enemy’s vehicle, the agents and Al Ghazi come under fire from the terrorists in an urban warfare masturbation sequence so intense you have to remind yourself to breathe.

The high points of The Kingdom are a white-knuckle thrill ride through uncharted territory for most Americans, but the behind-the-scenes political kowtowing drags a bit before the film gets to any main course. The film does a beautiful job of showing scenes that include the cultural differences as transitions between main shots to humanize the Saudi’s similarities to our own American life. Although, there are the hard edges to the militant lifestyle depicted as well, including the construction of a suicide vest and a terrorist cell prepping a suicide bomb.