# Three Kings (1999)

### reviewed by
Stephen Graham Jones

Three Kings opens just as Desert Storm is winding down, but still, manages to emblemize the whole war in that one opening scene, where the conflict is pared down to its most ridiculous: the American soldier fighting the Iraqi soldier for possession of one small little hill (mound) in the middle of the desert. With an opening like that the movie can only get more ridiculous. It does. It even gets side-splitting ridiculous at times, via a steady run of one-liners, but none of it is without purpose. Journalist Adrianna Cruz (Nora Dunn) sums it all up nicely: "The war is over and I don't know what the hell it was about." No one seems to, especially the soldiers, our three (four) 'kings,' whom we meet mid-celebration via the freeze-frame/subtitle trick (Pulp Fiction, Trainspotting, Lock, Stock & 2 Smoking Barrels, etc) that's still cool, but just barely. First there's the American soldier from the opening scene, Troy (Mark Wahlberg), vying for main-characterhood with Archie (George Clooney), the disillusioned special forces guy. Next there's Chief (Ice Cube), something of a holy roller qua LL Cool J in Deep Blue Sea, but a bit more effective. Last there's the wholly uneducated Vig (Spike Jonze), acolyte of Troy, token Texan. As the trailer spells out, too, soon enough the four of them get a lead on Saddam Hussein's stolen gold, and--making the cinematic leap that stealing from a thief isn't wrong--they set out one hot, final morning to quietly 'recover' it. But of course everything goes wrong, not the least of which is that their consciences kick in, and they begin to figure out 'why' they're there after all: to save refugees (i.e., be the Schindlers of the Persian Gulf). It's no big leap from there to the convention that when the thief in the movie is both sympathetic and gets the 'loot' early on, then that loot will have to be traded in for something more lasting. It even happens like that in Trapped in Paradise, a movie without all the moral clutter of a morally-dubious war, the kind of war which, in Lethal Weapon, produced Shadow Company, the bad guys who did essentially the same thing our three (four) kings are doing in Three Kings. Nevertheless, though, we know who the good guys are, who the bad guys are. War movies tend to work like this whether they want to or not. It takes an especially cool hand like Kubrick's to rise above it (Full Metal Jacket). Three Kings isn't Kubrick, not quite, although it does have its own brand of camera/editing work, which, when combined with the sepiatone cinematography qua the Courage Under Fire flashbacks, manages both to rush everything past and wash it out in a way we suspect accurately captures the American soldier's experience. Or, rather, it seems to capture what we imagine the memory of that experience must be like, which is quite a feat in itself for director David O. Russell. But of course this 'thirsty' cinematography could be called Peckinpah, too, and, with Three Kings, convincingly so, as the story of these four soldiers is almost uncomfortably similar to The Wild Bunch (Clooney as Holden, etc), even going so far as to leave the simpleton/hick back to the guard the prisoners, or, on a larger scale, having the good bad guys get righteous when it really counts. And then of course too one of their own gets taken hostage, tortured, all that. At least it strays from the path a little when Troy--the hostage--has a few bonding-type scenes with his captor, which writer John Ridley and Russell wisely back out of just as it was starting to feel Crying Game-ish. In the end, though--and beneath all the fancy camerawork perhaps meant to appeal to an audience usually not tuned into social issues--Three Kings is more or less a social statement: that America was motivated into the Gulf by greed. In case we miss this, the three (four) kings become aware for us, when they have to see firsthand the results of that war ('their actions')--or, when Troy is forced to drink oil, which is a touch heavy-handed, but so be it. The point gets made, at least. And it's not the only one: after Wag the Dog, of course the media has to play a role here, in a war fought on CNN. In this case, however--as with Electric Horsemen--that role is a redemptive one, which dovetails nicely with the Biblical allegory operating behind the scenes, ever so quietly. At one point a tanker of milk even spills out into this Euphrates valley, tempting us to make all kinds of allegorical connections. Before we can, though, Russell's rushed on to the next scene, opted to let it all accrete when he could have dwelt on it, which, like nearly everything else in Three Kings, was the correct decision, the proper amount of restraint, not the easy way out. It shows. The only thing missing is the Buffalo Springfield the trailer promised, but it's more than made up for, simply by the pleasant surprise that the trailer only covered the first third of the movie. Which is to say there's a lot more to Three Kings than you go in expecting, but, too, just enough conventional stuff that you never get lost. (c) 1999 Stephen Graham Jones

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