Three Kings, 1999.
Written and Directed by David O. Russell.
Starring George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube, Spike Jonze, Cliff Curtis, Nora Dunn and Jamie Kennedy.
SYNOPSIS:
Determined to take home more than sand fleas in the aftermath of the first Gulf War, four American soldiers go off into the Iraqi desert to find millions in stolen Kuwaiti bullion.
If there was a film in the late nineties that tested the edges of political cinema and gave a you a cinematic treat at the same time, like David O’ Russell’s Three Kings, then it totally passed me by.
I love war films. Ever since Rambo greased up his mullet and with his bare hands, a trusted meter long commando knife, his handy AK-47 and some grenades thrown in for good measure, he tore South East Asia and Afghanistan apart. Hollywood used to make war look, for lack of a more suitable word, fun. You can fire from the hip and destroy rows of enemy soldiers without even flinching. Chuck Norris in “Delta Force” was the quintessential modern day action hero Jesus, beard and all. He did not hesitate to smite his foes whether on a missile-equipped dirt bike or in hand-to-hand combat. You lived life imagining that war was like an ultimate computer game. It was like having the game “Call of Duty” as your running imagination.
Then came the first Gulf war and for the first time in my life I was sitting watching each explosion as it was happening on TV. The great attention grabbing News headlines on BBC, ITV and CNN, the cool mission names like ‘Operation Desert Storm’ and the full length reports on the F-15 fighters and the Stealth bombers made the whole thing look, well for lack of a more suitable word, exciting. But it also gave me a glimpse into the scary part of war. The part that most news reports didn’t show, unless you lived with parents who watched Middle Eastern news, like I did. My dad would read me the reports of American aircraft dropping bombs onto victims far away, distant from my living room floor. The pictures of children, about the same age as me, who lost limbs or were burnt by the raining fire, only helped to fuel my loathing for this insane and unnecessary act. From then on my perception of war changed as I began to question it’s whereabouts, delve into history books and look at previous wars and educate myself about their origins. I never again saw war as fun or exciting after this.
Three Kings came at a time when most had forgotten about the first Gulf War. Hollywood has a habit of creating war films well after the war finishes. Whether it’s because Hollywood agreed with the political premises of the war (which I doubt was the case), or were too scared to release such a film for fear of a nationalistic backlash, remain questions that need to be discussed on a critical level. What is for sure was that Three Kings was the first if not the only Gulf War film that tackles the gritty issues surrounding the conduct of the allied troops that we most certainly didn’t see or hear about in the western media.
Mark Wahlberg as Troy Barlow, Ice Cube simply known as Chief Elgin, and Spike Jonze as Conrad Vig, star as bored U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq just after the end of the Gulf War craving any sort of action. The action comes in the form a treasure map found in the anus of a prisoner of war. The way the myth of the treasure map travels within the base from soldier to soldier, Chinese whisper like, just shows the extent by which the soldiers’ inactivity gives rise to the use of stories and tales as a means of amusement. The film uses the classic trio character technique to tell the story with Troy (Wahlberg) as the family-man soldier, Elgin (Ice Cube) as the God fearing uber patriot soldier and Conrad (Jonze) as the nihilistic hick who, his compatriots repeatedly tell us, didn’t finish high school. When the frat boy style parties don’t become enough to amuse them, the rumors of a treasure map hidden in the orifice of a POW, entice them to go in search of gold stolen from Kuwait and in turn a better life for themselves and their families. When a disillusioned Special Forces Capt. Archie Gates (George Clooney) also catches wind of this map the trio gains a leader to guide them there. The journey takes them to a small village where they believe approximately $20 million in Kuwaiti bullion is hidden.
There, against the better judgment of some, they find themselves involved with villagers eager to rebel against Saddam Hussein and who mistakenly see the Americans as a small squad sent to liberate them (much like the actual case for the Kurdish rebels in Iraq). They soon find that the band of men, are actually here to liberate something completely different. But when the Iraqi troop presence in the village escalates, mind you only to quash the rebel uprising rather then to interfere with the US soldiers, and the senseless execution of the wife of a rebel prisoner in front of her family, Gates takes the decision to intervene with force. The group find themselves embroiled in a battle with the Iraqi squadron who capture Troy and begin their routine torture interrogations. What ensues is a glorious Hollywood action fest involving a jackknifing lorry spilling it’s milky contents everywhere, the use of mustard gas on the fleeing U.S. soldiers (a visual comment on the ultimately true accounts of the Iraqi use of chemical weapons in that war), and a brilliantly masterminded rescue plan involving a fleet of stolen Kuwaiti luxury cars kept by a sympathetic army defector in a bunker in the middle of the desert.
The film ends almost too cliché-ish with it’s the American soldiers do the right thing at the end of the day by freeing a small group of rebels, and taking them to the Iranian border as refugees. It was doomed to that fate but for it’s lingering well placed message about the unprecedented media coverage of this war and also the conduct of the media. Adriana Cruz, a journalist embedded with the U.S. regiment, when trying to find the AWOL group, encounters the burning oil fields of Kuwait and the geological impact it had. When she is confronted by a bird covered in oil and dying she says that this story has been “fucking done”, an indictment on the longevity of stories in the media, which ultimately get replaced for something more eye catching and shocking. It’s also a great criticism of how reporters reported the news, showing how they were in it just to catch that big story that would land them with more fame and notoriety.
In the end Three Kings is a war movie like any other great war movie that at the end always poses that existential question of ‘why do we go to war?’ Well this films answer is clearly shown by the revelations of Said Taghmoui’s torturer who in this powerful scene tells the idealistic Troy that “there is a lot of people in trouble in this world my man and you (America) don’t fight no fucking war for them”. When Troy replies with the whole bringing stability to the region argument, he is literally fed the answer with the help of a CD cover and some oil to which the torturer poignantly ends with the line, “this is your fucking stability my main man”.
Afshin Salehzahi
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