9/99
"The trouble with these international affairs," says a stuffy Robert Morley in Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines, "is they attract foreigners."
Wars are like that. Luckily though, we're Americans, not foreigners. We can just go in and do the necessary God-approved damage secure in the knowledge of our rightness, our unforeignness, and let the hapless foreigners sort through the rubble later. These international affairs keep getting trickier, however, so if we're lucky we can get them moving right along and finish them off quick before we have much time to think about them. Like an action movie that's fast and furious enough we hopefully don't have time to wonder what it's about or if it means anything.
The Gulf War was a conveniently brisk little affair, a kind of high-noon shootout that gave George Bush a chance to play Wyatt Earp (a role he obviously coveted after playing deputy to a former cowboy star all those years). A little confusing, though, for Bush's possé, like the guys in David O. Russell's Three Kings, who begin the film in March 1991 as hostilities officially cease; one of them, Army Sergeant. Troy Barlow (Mark Wahlberg), asks, "Are we shooting people or what?" He is, popping the top off a wildly gesticulating local as a better-safe-than-sorry measure, a shot that will be graphically exaggerated later in memory/flashback, with the head popping like a champagne cork atop a gusher of blood.
It's only appropriate that Barlow and three colleagues, Special Forces Capt. Archie Gates (George Clooney), Staff Sgt. Chief Elgin (Ice Cube) and Pvt. Conrad Vig (Spike Jonze), should try to make sense of their trip to the back of beyond with the promise of riches snatched from the ass of a captured Iraqi officer—not the riches themselves, of course, but a map to a hidden cache of gold bullion stolen from Kuwaiti sheiks by Saddam Hussein (it's not exactly victory snatched from the jaws of defeat, but in wartime you make do). Capt. Gates can't see anything wrong with stealing from a thief and figures the caper for a quick couple of hours in the Humvee and back before the annoying TV journalist (Nora Dunn) he's supposed to be escorting can calculate her chances of winning a long-awaited Emmy with standard government-issue news.
No such luck. Before the boys can count their blessings (they figure about $23 million worth) they're forced to estimate the price-tag on the lives of Iraqis hung out to dry, encouraged to rise against Saddam by Two-Gun George only to be cut down by their own army with their "liberators" (hooray for our side) forbidden by the frat-house frontiersman to do anything but look on.
Coming on at first like a typical gold-digging action flick, fast and furious enough we don't have time to think, Three Kings is really getting up in your face the better to stage a rear-guard sneak attack. The whiplash kineticism of Russell's style yanks us along with these guys, some of whom complain that they "didn't get to see any action," involving us so that we discover with them that action has consequences. It's bracingly direct and devious at once, like the visual gag, a sort of training film come to life, in which we see the truly visceral havoc wrought by a single gunshot. This bit, like that opening cork-popping head shot, gets a replay later in a new context that deepens the impact. The humor is Russell's smart bomb, expanding on contact with the characters' shock of recognition.
Our heroes' recovery of their moral bearings is ideally situated in the surreal landscape of a thoroughly up-to-date war, where underground bunkers resemble electronic superstores (Kuwait City, meet Circuit City), a captured man can make a distress call to his wife stateside via cell phone, a rescue mission proceeds in a desert caravan of luxury cars, where innocent victims literally cry over spilt milk and where even the necessary dehumanizing language of war bends to the demands of political correctness (Cube's Chief and Wahlberg's Barlow lecture Jonze's redneck Vig on preferable ethnic slurs less likely to offend their own ethnic cohorts).
The cast makes the most of characters about whom we don't know everything immediately, allowing Clooney to consolidate the gains he made with last year's Out Of Sight while Wahlberg, Cube, Dunn, and Cliff Curtis and Said Taghmaoui as Iraqis who resist typical ethnic typecasting, offer sturdy reinforcement as their characters surprise themselves with their responses to surprising circumstances. Coming to this large-scale production from the modestly budgeted independent comedy Flirting With Disaster (preceded by Spanking The Monkey, made for big-studio doughnut money), Russell makes a fluid transition to the big time without sacrificing independent spirit or distinctive comic invention in which hair-trigger wit and screwball stylization catapult the action and detonate serious issues (among other things, the film is surprisingly up-front with its criticism of Bush—who needs Saddam just like Saddam needs him).
There are echoes of M*A*S*H and such hallucinatory Vietnam epics as Apocalypse Now, but especially of Richard Lester's fragmentation-grenade approach to 1968s World War II satire How I Won The War (zany, dreamy, bitter and compellingly all over the place). It's not quite a Gulf War Dr. Strangelove, in spite of apparently similar ambitions (the ending, for example, even edged as it is with irony, is not as unconventional as most of what precedes it), but it is unconventional, even daring stuff. While most Hollywood blockbusters are drawn along the lines of a map yanked from somebody's ass, this is a real stealth mission, thoughtfully planned and craftily executed, that pays off in gold.
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