Best year ever: Three Kings
David O. Russell’s war movie hasn’t lost its bite.
David O. Russell’s Three Kings was one of several movies to scramble my brain and make me rethink what cinema could be when I saw it in October 1999. The war movie looked and felt like nothing I’d seen before, with its washed-out aesthetic, mix of humor and sudden violence, and themes that suggested maybe the Gulf War wasn’t the heroic endeavor we’d cheered on in middle school. I couldn’t properly classify it – was it a drama, a comedy, an action movie? At 20 years old, I still wasn’t aware movies could be remixed this way.
Twenty-five years later, Three Kings feels just as potent, biting and relevant as it did then. Its cynicism toward U.S. policies in the Middle East would become more relevant in the ensuing decade, and you would only have to tweak a bit of dialogue to have this movie take place five or ten years later and still resonate. This is one of the great anti-war films, and Russell’s best movie.
The film’s opening is iconic, with Mark Wahlberg entering the frame asking “Are we shooting?” We’re given a brief pause to wonder whether this is a meta flourish before he clarifies, “are we shooting people?” The 1991 war in the Gulf has just ended, and the rules of engagement are unclear. Wahlberg’s character, Troy Barlow, sees that an Iraqi soldier on a hill has a gun, so he shoots him; he doesn’t see the white flag of surrender in his hands. His fellow soldiers celebrate that one of them finally saw some action; Barlow’s face suggests that his feelings are a bit more complicated. But it doesn’t last long; the war is over, and the movie quickly cuts to the soldiers partying.
In the aftermath of the ceasefire, the soldiers are jubilant, but they don’t quite know why. Some are frustrated that they never got to shoot someone. Others, like Major Archie Gates (George Clooney), are approaching retirement and trying to figure out just what they accomplished. The soldiers celebrate freedom even though Saddam hasn’t been vanquished and the Iraqi people are still under his thumb – and the soldiers’ racist language shows they’ve dehumanized the “enemy” so much that they don’t see much point in helping them anyway – and while some, like Barlow, seem confused, others like Chief Elgin (Ice Cube) are happy just to follow orders and get the hell back to Detroit, while still others like redneck grunt Conrad Vig (Spike Jonze) still have a lot of aggression and racism to burn off.
Operation Desert Storm was the first big military action of my lifetime. I was in sixth grade when President George H.W. Bush ordered troops to secure Kuwait, and all I remember about that time was that we cheered on an easy victory for freedom. It wasn’t until I was a few years older that I learned there was – and always is – more than one side to any military conflict, and our presence in Iraq may have had less to do with defending freedom than in protecting a rich ally and making sure our precious oil was protected. In the years after 9/11, we’d get a sequel that was even foggier, with less clear-cut motives. War very rarely comes down to good vs. evil but rather protecting interests and losing sight of the humans in the crossfire.
Just as the U.S. found a way to profit through the guise of heroism, Archie and his cohorts find a way to go home a bit richer when a map to Saddam’s bunkers is found in one Iraqi soldier’s nether regions. Inside the bunker, the guys theorize, is millions of dollars in Kuwaiti bullion (no, Archie clarifies, not the cubes used to make soup). “Saddam stole it from the Kuwaitis, I have no problem stealing it from Saddam,” Gates says.
The three head off for what they think will be an easy heist – but, of course, it never is. While the Iraqi army is more than happy to abide by the ceasefire agreement and give the American soldiers whatever they ask – thinking they’re acting on official orders – they’re harsher with the locals who think the Americans are there to support their fight to take down Saddam. And the four Americans who want to escape with an easy, bloodless payday now have to deal with the reality of human lives that will still be at risk after they leave, and decide whether to abscond with their riches or stay – and risk prison or death – to escort the town folk to the Iranian border to seek refuge.
Three Kings is most energetic in its opening hour, when it moves with the speed of a heist film and delivers its most surreal imagery. There’s the raucous party back at camp and then a shocking moment where a rehearsal of the robbery leads to an inadvertent cow explosion. The stark, washed-out cinematography captures the oppressive heat and heightened anxiety of the war zone, and a sequence that takes us inside a human body to show the devastation of a bullet wound. Archie and the team arrive in poor villages but find their ways into bunkers filled with Rolexes, jewelry and luxury automobiles; when a missile rips through a tanker, it doesn’t explode but rather gushes forth a tidal wave of milk.
Russell employs this imagery to comment on the unreal nature of war, but it wasn’t until this viewing that I appreciated how assured he also was in the film’s action sequences. Nothing in the director’s filmography before or after Three Kings has suggested that he has a knack for action, but he shows great skill at maintaining geographical awareness and letting chaos unfold with clarity, so that we know where everyone is and what’s happening at every minute. He employs nearly every trick in the film, including effective use of speed-ramping to put us in the heads of the characters as they figure out what’s happening and decide how to respond. It’s thrilling at times, especially because Three Kings isn’t an action movie at heart, waiting for the next big CGI set piece. It’s a movie where the action flows organically from the story and where most of the movie the tension resides in the characters’ desire to not have things erupt into violence. This isn’t a movie with a high body count, but when people are killed, there are repercussions and impacts.
The director is a famously prickly person to work with, and his conflict with Clooney has been well reported, with the actor noting that they came to blows on the set. But whatever fights occurred behind the scenes aren’t evident on screen. Clooney, who was continuing the career rehab he started with the previous year’s Out of Sight, brings gravity and competence to the screen via shorthand, and his wry humor fits well with the film’s off-kilter comedy. At this point in his career, Ice Cube had only been in comedies, bad action movies and Anaconda, and his more subdued role here helped establish him as an actor. Wahlberg was also relatively green at this point – Boogie Nights had been two years earlier. There’s an emptiness to him that sometimes hurts his dramatic performances, but I think his work as Barlow is strong. He’s gung-ho, charismatic and overly confident early on, but Wahlberg captures the confusion the character feels as he is interrogated by an Iraqi soldier and finds his long-held views and blind patriotism shifting. Russell also gets good work out of Nora Dunn as a brassy journalist whose competence helps her keep her confusion at bay, and Jamie Kennedy as the dumb soldier who keeps her our of Archie’s way. Spike Jonze would go on a few weeks later to cement his status as one of our great directors with Being John Malkovich, but I don’t think I really appreciated his work here until now. Conrad seems to be the redneck comic relief; after 25 years of hearing amplified racist voices, I think he accurately captures the way ignorance and aggression can curdle in America, and he’s given a sweet arc where his anger becomes tempered by curiosity.
The film’s politics grow more nuanced after Archie and the team agree to help Iraqi citizens in exchange for help rescuing Troy, who’s been captured by soldiers. As the team talks to the rebels, they come to see the humans who will be left at risk when the United States leaves Iraq; the leader of the rebels says he studied business in the States only to come back and have the U.S. forces bomb his cafes. And while the movie’s climactic action scene features Gates shooting the soldiers torturing Barlow, Troy refuses to shoot his captor. And the movie’s final obstacle is not the Iraqi army at all but rather the U.S. forces who threaten to court marshal the hero for shepherding refugees to safety, and who almost kill Barlow by refusing him aid for a chest wound (eagle eye viewers might notice that the soldier who saves his life is actually comedian – and current Tim Walz impressionist – Jim Gaffigan). In the next decade, as we engaged in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this political ambiguity and open questioning of U.S. policies in the Middle East would become standard, but Three Kings was the first film in which I saw a recent military action criticized, and I’m sure it helped shape my burgeoning political views.
You can enjoy Three Kings as an exciting heist story and action movie, and it works on that level. But its depth and commentary still give it a kick that sticks to the ribs. It was one of the most unique and memorable films of the year when it was released twenty-five years ago. It’s lost none of its energy today.
I can value these points. As a casual movie goer, the line between, action-drama-comedy, is where we struggled to enjoy it.