The soldiers of Three Kings have taken their cue from movies about Vietnam. (Fitting, since the media-saturated Gulf War, their war, became a pop entertainment.) While driving through a long, flat Iraqi desert (in a Humvee with a Bart Simpson hood ornament), one of the men under Special Forces Sgt. Maj. Archie Gates’ (who’s steering) command requests a Beach Boys tune. These men want their Apocalypse Now moment, only instead of surfing, they bop to the music and skeet shoot out the back of the vehicle, armed with automatic rifles.
Our three kings (okay, four) are good fighters, but they don’t necessarily take Operation Desert Storm seriously—it’s a reprieve from their hellish day jobs. They are Gates, new father Sgt. Troy Barlow (Wahlberg), Sgt. Chief Elgin (Cube), and Pvt. Conrad Vig (music video director Jonze). At story’s start, President Bush has declared a ceasefire, and American troops are tying up loose ends. Barlow, Elgin, and Vig discover during a round up of Iraqi captives an "ass-map" that points to a bunker
filled with gold bullion.
Gates leaves his jurisdiction to commandeer the situation; he proposes—demands—that Barlow, Elgin, and Vig join him on a treasure hunt. Ditching his escort, a relentless reporter named Adriana Cruz (Nora Dunn), is easy. So is finding the treasure, until the four men realize the magnitude of discord still breathing in Iraq: Saddam’s men are threatening the dictator’s detractors (citizens of his own country) with violence.
When Gates and company arrive at the bunker with a stolen truck, ready to loot, the unarmed rebels want help. (Bush encouraged them to rise up against the government, but provided no military support for such cause.) Gates convinces the vault’s guards that this is a post-war mission, and even accepts their assistance in loading the truck. The situation could go off without a hitch: the former enemies bear no grudges. But the money-hungry Gates has a conscience, and when one female bystander is shot by a sadistic grunt before these Americans have left the scene, he orders Barlow, Elgin and Vig to open fire on the surrounding Arab forces. The result: Barlow is kidnapped, and the filmmakers imply that these would-be kings are seeing more action than they ever did during wartime.
Barlow is eventually locked in a dank room and wired up to a shocking device. His interrogator lost his family to the bombs, and he wants Barlow to imagine the demise of his own wife and child. (He does, in chilling, lasting images.) I liked these scenes best, because the political became personal. It’s one thing to champion the plight of thousands; it’s another to see a ceiling cave in atop a baby in a crib. Russell has shocked us before: his first film, Spanking the Monkey, is about a young man’s affair with his bedridden mother. (It’s great.) His second, Flirting With Disaster, features a character who has an armpit fetish. One could argue that it’s easier to make an audience react to such sexual deviance than explosions, though; Russell disturbs us in Three Kings by being no-nonsense about the violence. When Barlow conjures the detonation of his suburban home, Russell mutes the sound—we’re paying attention to the debris instead of THX bombast.
Three Kings is Russell’s first visually arresting picture. Stylistically, it stands apart from other war dramas. Newton Thomas Sigel’s cinematography of the exteriors is overexposed and extremely grainy, which is, of course, entirely appropriate. One practically breaks out in sweat staring at the screen. (A friend enthusiastically added, "It’s like having sand in your eyes.") This also helps to blur the fact that the actual locations are far removed from the Persian Gulf facade. (Three Kings was shot in Arizona, California, and Mexico.) Russell throws plenty at Sigel’s camera for it to observe—as was the case with Russell’s previous efforts, the most absurd moments are also the film’s most realistic, even the most poignant. (We watch a bullet puncture an organ from the inside.)
If anything, Three Kings settles down and stops surprising us. Its climax is pure Hollywood, no doubt the answer to why a major studio felt comfortable getting into bed with the indie-minded Russell. Subsequently, the characters become more cartoonish—Barlow’s post-torture revelry felt phony, and Chief, a strong presence in the first third, fails to escape the God-fearing-ultra-serious-anti-racist-black-man-of-power cliché—so much for Cube avoiding token status. (The Arab players, on the other hand, duck stereotype.) Clooney, too, transforms into a blandly heroic protestor—marching with the rebels, I waited for him to shout, "Let my people go!" Hayseed Vig notwithstanding, the protagonists are very intelligent, and self-serving, too; I had a glimmer of hope, based on Russell’s filmography, that our antiheroes would revert to their greedy selves at some juncture. (It’s not spoiling much to write that.)
Then again, what historical importance would such nastiness serve? (There’s already enough cynicism in the film’s mentioning of Kuwait’s oil-infested waters.) Russell offers the masses a primer on the oft-dismissed Gulf conflict, and pulled off a neat trick: a war tale full of battles that takes place after a truce has been declared. If he set out to make something socially/culturally/politically/globally significant, he succeeded. With flair.
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