Three Kings 1999
I had heard a lot about this one so I wanted to check it out before it left the theaters. I think maybe this movie didn’t do so well because it was a little too realistic. The basic plot is four soldiers (George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube, and Spike Jonze) go looking for Iraqi gold days after the Gulf War ceasefire. Frankly, it’s kind of a lame plot, but they needed some kind of framework to hang the movie on.
It starts out with a probably very accurate picture of a rear echelon soldier’s life during wartime. Since we won this one there aren’t a lot of the confused scenes that you get in most war movies. Instead these are full-swagger GI’s who are part of an army that has just won the most impressive military victory of the century, even though all but Clooney are reservists with “day jobs” back home. I wish they could have stretched out some of that. Nobody ever seems to know what they are supposed to be doing or why. There are surreal combinations of things you haven’t seen in war movies before: nerf footballs (apparently donated in huge quantities to the GIs) wired by a Timothy McVeigh kind of character with plastic explosives and used as target practice to pass the time on a humvee ride through mine fields; a female reporter, tired of being spoon-fed stories about burning oil wells and dying birds, standing in the middle of a live gunfight as everyone shoots around her; soldiers are issued a single rubber glove (two would be too expensive?) and then need it; an NCO tells a corporal to stop using the term “sand coon” and instead use the term “towel head” because the former is offensive to the black soldiers.
Clooney plays a jaded retiring special forces major looking for a big score to set him up for life (I had a problem here: Clooney seems too young to be retiring and a major should know better than to go around stealing gold, but he does a good job with the role). The three guys he teams up with are all pretty much regular guys thrown into the bizarre situation of war but never got to see any real battle. The guys are not played as stupid, but they’re not exactly geniuses either: they’re baggage handlers, store managers, high school dropouts with nothing better to do. They are there as soldiers but they still talk about music, football and worry about what’s going on back home. Meanwhile they are caught in the middle of the realization of Bush politics: a war that started too late and ended too soon. They don’t like to shoot people, but they know that sometimes they have to. I guess all of this sounds like regular war story stuff, but it has a very unique quality to it and the characters are written and played perfectly. Everyone is a human, no one is a cardboard cut-out, not even the bad guys.
Back to the plot: like I say, it is probably the weakest part of the movie but it does present these guys with some unique choices. The director is still young and the overall effort is rough at times but this is still a good movie that captures the feel of the entire Gulf War even though it only deals with one very small part of the conflict. It is like Viet Nam lite: intensity and ambiguity without the desperation and stink of defeat.
I will give this movie a B, but pieces of it were definitely in the A range.
Written: 06 Jan 2000
Owned on: Blu-ray, DVD, Digital