THE 100 BEST WAR MOVIES: #76. Three Kings (1999)

           

                 “Three Kings” is a war movie released in 1999.  It was written and directed by David Russell from a story idea by comedian John Ridley.  Ridley challenged himself to write a script in record time.  He finished “Spoils of War” in seven days.  Eighteen days later, Warner Brothers bought the script.  Russell was intrigued with the one sentence description of the plot -  “heist set in the Gulf War”.  Russell claims he did not even read Ridley’s script, he just took the idea and wrote his own script.  Russell was not even consulted.  He was given a “story by” credit, but there is still bad blood.  At the time of filming, George Clooney was a TV star hoping to make a splash in movies.  He worked hard to get the reluctant Russell to cast him.  Russell had originally wanted Clint Eastwood, but decided to rewrite the part for a younger actor.  He then moved on to Nick Cage, but he became unavailable.  He settled for Clooney.  Spike Jonze made his acting debut in the film. Russell’s improvisational style for making the film caused tensions with the crew.  He yelled a lot.  Clooney would stick up for the crew and this caused bitterness between the star and the director.  They came to blows at one point.  The truth was somewhere between the two men’s description of their relationship.  Russell was an asshole making an avant-garde picture and Clooney was overly protective of the crew.  The film cost about $48 million and made over $100 million.

             The movie is set in March, 1991 – “the war has just ended”.  This is a reference to the Persian Gulf War.  The movie opens with a provocative scene in which a soldier named Barlow (Mark Wahlberg) shoots an Iraqi soldier who may or may not be trying to surrender.  This was a common situation at the end of the war.  The scene shifts to the celebration back at base camp.  (Some of the soldiers are drinking out of mouthwash bottles.  During the war, because of the ban on the consumption of alcohol, soldiers had their relatives send mouthwash bottles with vodka with blue coloring.)  The movie is outstanding in showing the chaos at the end of the war.

            During the searching of Iraqi prisoners, Vig (Spike Jonze) finds a paper stuffed in a prisoner’s anus.  The paper is a map to a bunker where Saddam Hussein has stashed millions in gold bars.  When Major Gates (Clooney) gets wind of the map, he takes charge of the trio of Barlow, Vig, and Elgin (Ice Cube) and they go off in a humvee to get rich quick.  Surprise – complications arise.  These involve encounters with Iraqi soldiers and Iraqi civilians, including rebels.  

ACTING:                      A

ACTION:                      B  6/10 (quantity)

ACCURACY:               N/A

PLOT:                           A

REALISM:                   C

CINEMATOGRAPHY:      A

SCORE:                        B

 

BEST SCENE:  Barlow gets tortured

BEST QUOTE:  Conrad:  “I didn’t join the Army to pull paper out of people’s asses.”

              “Three Kings” takes a historical event (the Iraqi uprising after the Persian Gulf War) and injects a fictitious story into that chaos.  When the Persian Gulf War ended with Hussein still in power, the Bush Administration encouraged the Iraqi people to rise up.  The Shia in the South took up the call and at first were successful.  Unfortunately, the war ended with the Iraqi Republican Guard crippled, but not powerless.  It was able to carry out Hussein’s orders to ruthlessly put down the rebellion because fighting lightly armed civilians was more its skill set than combating the U.S. Army.  To make matters worse, the peace agreement did not forbid the use of helicopters.  An oversight that was to bring disaster to the insurgents.   The helicopter in the movie is a reference to how Hussein used helicopters to put down the Iraqi rebellion due to the fact that the Bush Administration did not cover non-fixed wing aircraft in its no-fly ban. 

            The movie is very entertaining.  It came out after “Saving Private Ryan” and “The Thin Red Line” and joined them in juicing up the war movie genre for modern audiences.  It is different and more unorthodox than those other films.  It is the MTV version of war.  The use of hand-held cameras and Steadicams gives it a journalistic feel. It also uses CSI-style graphics to show the effects of bullet wounds.  Barlow’s wounding is depicted from inside his body.  Russell consulted a doctor friend and asked him to describe the weirdest wound he had ever seen.  (Russell got in trouble when he joked that the shot was done using a human cadaver.)  The quartet intervenes in a wild firefight that is one of the coolest ever filmed.  The use of slo-mo and graphic visuals of bullets entering bodies is visceral.  The battle is not depicted as a fireworks extravaganza, but more like a multi-player tennis match.

            The movie is not just eye candy.  The acting is stellar from the ensemble.  Even the novice Jonze holds his own.  Clooney’s charismatic performance conclusively proves that his decision to jump from TV was a wise one.  Wahlberg cemented his status as a major star.   Most of the Iraqi parts were played by Iraqi refugees.  More importantly, the screenplay is thought-provoking.  It does not preach, but makes it clear that the period at the end of the Persian Gulf War was a messed-up situation and the U.S. should not be proud of our role in the Iraqi Insurrection.  It even includes a sympathetic Iraqi torturer (Said played by Said Taghmaoui).  This character sets the movie apart from most war on terrorism movies where the terrorists are portrayed as evil people with evil motives.  

 In some ways the movie is a biting satire of the military and the media.  It’s not laugh out loud funny, but there is tinge of humor in it.  Although the bigger picture is conveyed, the movie dwells at the human interest level.  It depicts how government decisions affect civilians.  The movie implies that the American government doesn’t care about the people in a country we fought a war in.  But the four main characters are not the stereotypical ugly Americans.  They may be greedy, but they are humane and care about the civilians caught in the cross fire.  I say cross fire even though the war was officially over, that did not mean that the Iraqi people safe, especially if they were anti-Hussein.

When you have seen as many war movies as I have, movies that are different end up standing out.  There are not very many satires that include combat.  “Three Kings” reminds me of “Kelly’s Heroes”.  George Clooney plays Clint Eastwood.  “Three Kings” has a goal beyond just making an entertaining heist set in a war.  It informs the audience of the screwed up American policy after the war ended.  Most Americans tuned out when the war ended in a crushing victory for the USA USA USA!  “Three Kings” added a post script that sobered up the patriotism.