In theaters

THE KINGDOM, directed by Peter Berg, written by Matthew Michael Carnahan, 110 minutes, rated R.

The new Peter Berg movie, “The Kingdom,” is at its best in its opening moments. We’re in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and there on a ballfield several American oil workers and their families have gathered to play ball within the confines of their compound.

Everything appears to be going well – you can almost smell the hot dogs, the good cheer, the apple pie – until the playing field becomes a battlefield, with the Americans being gunned down by a terrorist cell apparently tapped by Allah to do his dirty work. Suicide bombers detonate themselves. Chaos erupts. Limbs and other assorted body parts hurl themselves at the screen.

It’s an ugly, violent opening that recalls the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, but since this is a big-budget Hollywood movie released on the cusp of awards season, you sense the rest of the movie could go one of two ways.

Either America is going to defeat this cell (otherwise known as the commercial way), or the movie is going to dig into the trenches and intelligently grapple with what occurred, why it occurred, and seek out those responsible and bring them to justice (otherwise known as the award-winning way).

Initially, it appears as if the movie is going to shoot for the latter, but unfortunately, since shooting for box office gold is this film’s real priority, it goes for the former, with the FBI, which lost two agents to the attack, taking the case. Not that they’re exactly given the green light to do so. FBI Special Agent Ronald Fleury (Jamie Foxx) goes against the government’s wishes and leads three colleagues – Jennifer Garner as a forensics specialist, Chris Cooper as a bomb expert and Jason Bateman as the intelligence guru – in a covert trip overseas.

There, they are met with the sort of opposition meant to stymie them, but which they eventually work around thanks to a Saudi colonel (Ashraf Barhom) assigned to watch and protect them. Initially, he does so with gruff assertiveness. But then, as he comes to question his country because, you know, these Americans who know nothing about Saudi Arabia (they don’t even know the language) have gleaned within 48 hours the sort of critical insights he hasn’t been able to do in a lifetime, he starts to listen to them and help.

If that carries with it a whiff of condescension, well, “The Kingdom” is filled with it. It also is filled with its share of impressive action sequences, which are the film’s best selling points. At least it does them right.

But as the film reveals itself to be increasingly, disappointingly manipulative and obvious, you see it for what it is – purely opportunistic, trading off our war in the Middle East and the fears surrounding it while offering audiences a pro and con look at the Arab community that grates with its black-and-white simplicity. There is no shading here, no gray tones, just a movie designed by those and for those who get their information from headlines and sound bites, nothing more substantial.

If this film underscores anything, it’s just how deeply we still misunderstand the Middle East and how our culture – in this case, pop culture – completely misses complexities it can’t even begin to understand.

Grade: D+

On Blu-ray disc

MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA

UNDERWORLD

Available this week are two films new to Blu-ray disc, including Rob Marshall’s “Memoirs of a Geisha,” which essentially is Jackie Collins by way of James Clavell.

Taken for what it is – soap opera, nothing more – the film, which is the best-looking yet in the high-definition format, can be entertaining, particularly after the awkward first third, in which Marshall (“Chicago”) overplays every emotion to the point of laying it bare onscreen.

Though it takes place in the East, his movie is designed for those of us in the West, who demand the sort of emotion the East resists. As such, the clanging of cultures can be oddly fun, regardless of whether that was Marshall’s intent.

For instance, when the main character, a geisha-in-training named Sayuri (Ziyi Zhang), finally rises up against her hateful nemesis geisha Hatsumomo (Gong Li) – a teahouse tramp who has been trying to undo Sayuri for years, ever since she was a child dropped at the okiya – the hair-pulling, slapping, shrieking and shoving that ensues zips with energy.

Grounding the movie is Sayuri’s geisha trainer, Mameha, who is played with reserve and grace by the Chinese actress Michelle Yeoh. Even when she must talk to Sayuri in sexual metaphors about eels finding their way into caves, she does so with tact, gleaning over the dialogue with remarkable confidence and somehow not a trace of humor.

Second up is the Blu-ray release of “Underworld,” a shallow, over-stylized movie that slides into the cinematic gutter with Kate Beckinsale as a gun-wielding vampire out to kill a hive of werewolves.

The special effects are good and they do create a stylized mood of dread, particularly in high definition, but the characters are beyond cardboard and the story is so chaotic, it drags like a corpse. The movie is a gloomy confusion of underdeveloped ideas that wants to be a supernatural version of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, but it dies one bloody, boring death along the way.

Grades: “Geisha”: C+; “Underworld”: D+