David O. Russell’s Three Kings is a movie I can remember wanting to watch back when it was first released, way back in 1999. But it was yet another example of something I never quite managed to get around to, crowded out by other things vying for my attention over the years. The strange thing, though, is that the movie is just as relevant (if not moreso) close to a decade and a half on from its creation.
It’s fundamentally a heist movie, set against the backdrop of the immediate aftermath of Operation Desert Storm (or, if you prefer, the First Gulf War). I was finishing up high school around the time of Desert Storm, and I remember lots of crazily contradictory things about those days. I remember how surreal it was simply to have the U.S. engaged in a major military action for the first time in my life; the World Wars and Korea and Vietnam were events from history books that other people had lived through and no more real to me than the fictional conflicts in Orwell’s 1984. I remember my grandmother fretting excessively, after having made it through Vietnam without either of her sons being drafted, that one of her grandsons (me, most likely, since I was the oldest, but possibly my cousin or even my Little Bro if things dragged out long enough) would be called to service and never make it home. I remember being devastated in the way only a bleeding heart teenage idealist can be, because I was sure that a utopian war-free future was right around the corner for my generation, having learned the lessons our parents fought for in Vietnam, and yet here we were recapitulating bad mistakes.
Of course those are all impressions from the earliest days of Desert Storm, which ended up lasting a grand total of six weeks. In my mind, the soundtrack of mid-January 1991 is dominated by a heartbreakingly earnest cover version of “Give Peace a Chance” by Yoko and Sean and a who’s who of zeitgeisty pop stars and alt-rockers. A month and a half later, Vietnam no longer haunted the U.S. military, it was simply relegated to history, and a modern victory was being celebrated, and an old Vietnam protest song was replaced on the soundtrack by Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.”
So how brilliant is it that Russell, working with eight years’ worth of hindsight, makes sure that his opening scenes of soldiers in Iraq partying in triumph includes those soldiers not just listening to but hollering wildly and unironically along with the words of “God Bless the USA”? It took me back to the early 90’s in a hurry, that’s for sure. And it captures a lot of the feeling of those times, the sense of wonder and almost disbelief: what had we been so afraid of all those years since Vietnam? We won a whole war in 42 days, and it was easy, with enemy soldiers surrendering without a fight because we totally outclassed them (and they were underequipped and starving)! We’re the supreme global superpower! What else should we do with this newfound sense of invincibility?
And the answer, in the case of Three Kings, is to grab some Kuwaiti gold, partly because the soldiers deserve it for liberating Kuwait in the first place, partly because they deserve it for overturning decades of American malaise, and partly because the post-war landscape is almost totally lawless and no one is there to stop them. Them, in this case, consists of George Clooney, Ice Cube, Mark Wahlberg and Spike Jonze, I should mention, all of whom are excellent throughout the whole film; I especially found Wahlberg’s portrayal of a young new father who just wants to do right by his wife and baby girl compelling (but anyone who reads this blog regularly/knows me at all should not find that even slightly surprising).
Unfortunately, as I mentioned, this is a heist movie, and heist movies are almost always about how the heist goes wrong. (Ocean’s Eleven being one of the major exceptions, and given Clooney’s presence in both that would make for one fascinating double feature.) The real strength of Three Kings lies in the manner in which the heist unravels, as the soldiers get drawn into the struggles of the rebels and refugees who oppose the regime of Saddam Hussein and are in for nothing but misery, torture and death once the U.S. Army evacs out of the area and the despot has no choice but to face-savingly reassert his vicious authority over his own people. Nowadays, of course, we are several years past the ultimate fallout from the decisions made around the time of Desert Storm, including fighting another Gulf War to settle the Hussein matter with more finality. I believe we still have a ways to go before history can judge either of the Gulf Wars; all I can say from personal experience was that my Little Bro ended up joining ROTC in college and serving in Iraqi Freedom and it felt unsettlingly full-circle (which did nothing to ameliorate the fact that when W. tried in his typical way, i.e. employing his dullard’s sense of humor, to justifying going after Hussein by saying “This guy tried to kill my dad” I was furious on my own blood relation’s behalf). But the fact that Russell, before the turn of the millennium, was probing at these questions of what happened in Iraq after we won the war but left the people of Iraq to fend for themselves, is a little bit mind-blowing.
I don’t think Three Kings is a perfect movie by any means. There’s a plot complication wherein Wahlberg gets captured by Republican Guard loyalists, and tortured by someone who monologues about how he was trained by U.S. forces and then further monologues about how his own infant son was killed by Allied bombing in the earliest parts of the coalition offensive. Wahlberg mouths some platitudes about how the U.S. did what it had to do for “stability” in the region and the torturer shoves a Michael Jackson CD jewel case in Wahlberg’s mouth, scoops some oil out of barrel (conveniently labeled OIL) and pours the oil down Wahlberg’s throat while growling “Here is your stability!” So that’s a bit heavy-handed and on the nose with the symbolism of cultural exports and fossil fuels and all, hilarious but I’m assuming unintentionally so. Also, the movie basically has a happy ending; one of the soldiers dies (which is all but demanded by the premise) but the others get honorably discharged after helping the refugees escape over the border, and the epilogue shows them enjoying happy lives back home in the states. It’s honestly hard to tell if the epilogue is supposed to be sincere or satirical; maybe it’s a bit of both.
Three Kings isn’t a fawning love letter to American military might, but it’s not a total condemnation, either. From start to finish, and especially during the tense standoff scene where the refugees may or may not make it out of the country, the recurring theme seems to be “U.S. soldiers will almost always do the right thing … eventually … but it often takes them right up until the very last possible moment to come through.” Not exactly “God Bless the USA” but that’s what makes Three Kings something still worth checking out today, as opposed to an embarrassingly kitschy artifact of another time.
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