What a let-down it is to watch an action movie at home. It’s just not the same on a small screen, even a 42-inch screen.
I noticed a couple things this time through that I didn’t notice the first time.
One is when Leavitt was kidnapped and they were going to film him (one imagines) being beheaded, one of the bad guys puts on a black ski mask to cover all his facial features. That guy is wearing a stolen Saudi police uniform with a name tag on it, and he doesn’t cover the name tag. So that would certainly make it easier for the authorities to figure out whose uniforms were stolen. Even if it’s a very common name, it sure narrows things down. I couldn’t read the name tag, but anybody watching the video they were making would have been able to.
Early on, Sykes for no apparent reason wanders over to a police or National Guard checkpoint and they start hollering at him. He stands there like a dope while Colonel al-Ghazi calls out the soldiers, “Mu mushkilah” (“No problem”). I thought that might be supposed to be where Mayes learned the Arabic phrase she uses at the end of the movie, but it’s not. The phrase she uses is “Ma laysh” (“It’s nothing”–more or less). So there’s still no explanation of any kind of where she would have learned that.
The DVD has a lot of nice special features, which helps make up for watching it on a small screen.
One feature is the final shootout sequence shown from four different viewpoints. That was really cool, but it have the unfortunate side effect of my having to hear the cringe-worthy, cheesy line
Ronald Fleury: Which side do you think Allah’s on?
Colonel Faris Al Ghazi: We are about to find out!
over and over again. Okay, it’s not that cheesy by itself, but the fact that Fleury stops al-Ghazi so that he can ask him that stupid question instead of carrying out the @#$%ing mission, that’s what’s so cheesy.
Anonymous Arabist وين الناس 