DIRECTOR/SCREENWRITER
David
O. Russell
STORY BY
John
Ridley
PRODUCERS
Paul Junger Witt
Edward L. McDonnell
Charles Roven
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Newton Thomas Sigel
MUSIC
Carter Burwell
EDITOR
Robert K. Lambert
CAST
George Clooney (Archie Gates)
Mark Wahlberg (Troy Barlow)
Ice Cube (Elgin)
Spike Jonze (Vig)
Cliff Curtis (Amir Abdullah)
Nora Dunn (Adriana Cruz)
Jamie Kennedy (Wogaman)
Saïd Taghmaoui (Said)
Mykelti Williamson (Horn)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 114m
U.S. release: October 1, 1999
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Official
website
Other David
O. Russell films
reviewed on this website:
- Flirting
with Disaster
|
Every
year or so, a serious studio movie thunders into view; the critics,
tired of teen junk and overawed by any film remotely intended
for adults, declare it a masterpiece and spill lots of magazine
ink (cover stories, interviews tied to reviews, etc). Three
Kings is one such movie, and the surprise is that it's actually
pretty good. It has a distinctive look and feel, an atmosphere
of burnout and chaos; it launches at a high energy level and
generally stays there. The buzz, however, wears off fast. As
with Natural
Born Killers, the roughhouse style leaves an afterimage,
but the serious points the film tries to make don't follow you
home.
We're in Iraq, right after Operation Desert Storm has reached
its anticlimax. Many of the soldiers stationed in the Gulf have
been pumped up for combat, but it's been a smart-bomb, PlayStation
war -- death from above, but not much excitement on the ground.
We meet a few of these soldiers just marking time in the sand:
nice guy Troy (Mark Wahlberg), born-again Chief (Ice Cube), callous
redneck Vig (Spike Jonze, director of the upcoming Being
John Malkovich), and cynical Special Forces captain Archie
Gates (George Clooney). They're all itching for adventure, and
they find it in a map that may lead to millions of dollars' worth
of stolen Kuwaiti gold bullion hidden in one of Saddam's bunkers.
In a way, writer-director David O. Russell (who previously did
the acclaimed indie comedies Spanking the Monkey and Flirting
with Disaster) is itching for action, too. You can feel
his excitement at painting on a broad canvas full of hair-trigger
shootouts and exploding trucks. But I'm afraid he also wants
us to consider the human cost of the same violence he thrills
us with, and this doesn't always work. The movie shifts tones
many times, and though that doesn't bother me, Three Kings
loses some of its disreputable charge when it starts going human
on us. Like many directors before him, Russell can't resolve
the complex issue of anti-violence movie violence and our complicated
response to it.
What we have here is an attempt at a thinking person's adventure
film -- it even pauses to show us exactly what a bullet can do
to a man's innards, the infected pockets of flesh filling with
bile -- and on that level, compared with the stupid and meaningless
concussive epics we usually get, Three Kings is near the
head of its class. The characters are sketched in for us in a
backhanded, wise-ass manner; the central figure, Archie Gates,
is also the least developed -- he's your basic cynic who sticks
his neck out for nobody, until he gradually learns compassion
-- and George Clooney simply seems to be walking in the footsteps
of a hundred change-of-heart anti-heroes before him. He knows
how to take charge, though, and he and his fellow actors, in
Archie's words, do whatever's necessary at any given moment.
While you're watching it, Three Kings feels like a hipper,
bolder breed of war movie, with its hallucinatory left-out-in-the-sun
photography (cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel did the honors)
and its satirical swipes at American pop culture invading Iraq.
Afterward, though, what you remember are the scenes of moral
awakening that generally bring the movie to a dead stop. Three
Kings begins like an action-comedy and ends as a message
movie bucking for Oscars. It tells us that saving human lives
(Archie and his crew eventually try to get some Iraqi refugees
over the border to freedom) is nobler than grabbing the gold
-- a comforting moral the American audience is always ready to
hear, if not always to heed. Greed and dictatorship: bad. Compassion:
good. It doesn't take much to be a media masterpiece these days. |
