Directed by David O. Russell - 1999 poster
A strange film - to watch and to review. Essentially it is the story of a heist, which goes wrong, partly because of the trio deciding to help refugees get to the Iraq-Iran border rather than high-tail it with (most of) the loot. Trying to decide why the movie also misfired, I was drawn to George Clooney's comment on the director David Russell - there's an element of David that was in way over his head... It's no good jamming (black) humour up against horrific pictures of a woman's head spurting blood, of a mildly amusing interrogator being paired with the torture of Mark Wahlberg; and two gruesome shots of the inside of a body after a bullet has entered it; and calling it satirical or surreal. It felt more like confusion of aims.
There were several shafts aimed at American foreign policy in the Middle East and at President Bush. The films starts with the headline March 1991. The War just ended. Then it moves to a scene where a US soldier asks, Are we shooting people, or what? He then proceeds to kill an Iraqi some yards away on a mound. Congratulations, you just shot a raghead. Other soldiers gather round for a photograph. Meanwhile an American T.V. reporter, Adriana Cruz, tasks a soldier, They say you exercised the ghost of Vietnam with a clear moral imperative. Answer We liberated Kuwait. She fires back, This is a Media war and you'd better get on board. Too true.
Ice Cube, Wahlberg and Clooney
Then the 'humour'. An Iraqi has to take his trousers down and a rolled up map is found sticking up his rear-end. The 'Three Kings' - Major Archie Gates (Clooney), Sergeant Troy Barlow (Wahlberg) and Staff Sergeant Chief Elgin (Ice Cube) - embark on the mission to find and steal Saddam's equally stolen gold. Elgin has a ring of Jesus fire to guide my decisions. On their way, they practise their armaments by blowing up a cow (gratuitous and certainly not amusing). There follows, in quick succession, a firefight; a tanker full of milk crashing and spilling its load everywhere; a CS gas attack; Troy gets captured and interrogated but is strangely able to 'phone his wife back in the USA from deep underground; more fighting. Then a 'politically correct' bit, where the interrogator quizzes Troy about what is wrong with Michael Jackson! He shouts, It's so obvious a black man make the skin white and the hair straight and you know why? Your sick fucking country make the black man hate himself, just like you hate the Arabs and the children you bomb over here. Then it's back to a bit more black humour.
Too often, the viewer is trying to make out who is who: Kuwaitis, rebel Iraqis, pockets of pro-Saddam fighters (was it their helicopter which suddenly appeared?), the heist Americans and the pursuing Americans? Even when the gold is returned to the Kuwaitis, some is missing. Did the rebels manage to keep what was given to them? the Three Kings certainly didn't, as we see them in mundane jobs back in the USA.
The movie was shot in Arizona, California and Mexico. Rather than prepared, organised shot lists, Russell preferred an improvisational, on-the-fly directing approach, which not go down well with the cast or crew and probably accounts for the hit-and-miss effect in the story telling. Surprisingly (to me) the film was critically acclaimed. Roger Ebert gave it 4* out of 4*, saying Three Kings is one of the most surprising and exciting movies I've seen this year; but was closer to my opinion when he added - weird masterpiece, a screw-loose war picture that sends action and humour crashing head-on into each other and spinning off into political anger. The movie made over $154 million overall.
2005 DVD
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