A Bit Of Eccentricity By

Its Director Helps ‘Three Kings’

After watching Three Kings, an unabashedly off-kilter war film from the twisted sensibilities of director David O. Russell (Spanking the Monkey, Flirting With Disaster), one is left with the unenviable task of trying to categorize this motion picture. So, what kind of movie is it? Let’s begin by saying it’s a film that defies a one sentence description… unless it’s the sort of eighty-word, comma-filled creation that Hemingway used to write. But it did dawn on me that Russell’s Gulf War flick is so unconventional that it might have saved Terrence Malick’s largely ignored World War II effort, The Thin Red Line, if Three Kings had appeared in between Malick’s film’s debut and the half-year-earlier release of Steven Spielberg’s acclaimed Saving Private Ryan. Three Kings would have been the perfect sorbet to cleanse moviegoers’ palates from Spielberg’s searing epic and prepare them for Malick’s more elusive, existential work.

Three Kings is set directly after a cease-fire is declared in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, a conflict which the film posits had nearly every soldier confused about what exactly they were doing and what was truly happening. In fact, the film opens with one of its main characters, Army sergeant Troy Barlow (Mark Wahlberg), lining up an Iraqi soldier in his weapon’s sights as he asks, genuinely puzzled, “Are we shooting anyone today?” He and his mates, however ecstatic over the end of hostilities, also feel gypped about their overall experience in the Middle East. To make up for a lack of action they follow up on a map that claims to lead to buried treasure: a stash of Kuwaiti gold bullion reportedly stolen by Saddam Hussein. Led by maverick Special Forces Captain Archie Gates (George Clooney), Barlow and his fellow soldiers (played by Ice Cube and Spike Jonze) secretly set out to recover the gold for themselves.

Of course, their best laid plans – “easy in, easy out, no gunfire” – go astray when they come face to face with the reality of the plight of the people, the Iraqi rebels who now, without the benefit of US support, find themselves powerless against Saddam’s bullying forces.

Three Kings begins with a series of very ironic, humorous distance as Russell, who also wrote the screenplay, carves out a setting in which media correspondents jockey mercilessly for interesting stories and military leaders seem more interested in feeding the press the right interview subjects than in dealing with war strategy. But as the movie progresses, a sense of urgency develops, as the characters must stare down a moral choice of whether to get involved with the plight of 55 embattled Iraqi rebels or take the money and run.

Russell’s approach to Three Kings is fascinatingly fresh and interesting. He grips viewers early on by making us vividly aware (via a graphic fantasy sequence in which the camera shows us what Gates describes as he enlightens his comrades on the effects of a bullet entering the human body) that anything goes in his universe, including flashbacks, imaginary sequences, and his inventive depiction of gunplay, as bullets hiss ominously through the air with frightening intensity and devastating results. Also, the texture of the film has a graininess to it that gives it a pseudo-documentary feel, yet its vividly bright colors lend it an otherworldly nature. The contrast of the two elements keys us in to the fact Russell’s movie strives to take us to places we’ve never been – like visiting another world – yet also infuses that universe with a reality that begs our complete attention.

Three Kings, rated R for graphic violence and raw language, is engrossing and, in the end, thanks to fine work by its cast and the eccentric vision of its director, surprisingly affecting.