Three Kings

I remember seeing the previews for this and being intrigued by the concept -- a heist movie in the middle of the Gulf War -- but I never got around to seeing it. Guess I wasn't that intrigued. Well, I finally got around to seeing it. I started it up, expecting a loud, dumb movie full of gunfights, quips, and explosions, which was fine with me. What I did not expect was a movie that tears apart the war industry from inside out. Three Kings starts off about four soldiers (way to do the fourth one dirty, movie title) in the post-armistice period of the Gulf War who come across a map that shows the location of an Iraqi bunker where Saddam Hussein stored stolen Kuwaiti gold. They figure since the peace treaty is signed, they can march right in, grab the gold without protest since the Iraqi troops won't want to violate the peace accord, and leave. But the gold is in a small town where Kuwaiti hostages are being kept, and while there, they witness the Iraqi soldiers terrorize these people whom, in accordance with the treaty, the US soldiers cannot help without reigniting the war. Consciences and consequences follow. If this were just an action movie, it would still be damned fun. The dialogue between George Clooney, Ice Cube, Mark Wahlburg, and Spike Jonze is fun when it can be and believable when it needs to be. They're not terribly deep characters -- in particular Jonze's character, who is just dumb all the time -- but they're enjoyable, and Clooney and Wahlburg actually do get some evolution. When it switches from a heist movie to an action movie, the action is well shot and intense, but never feels like it's falling into the cliches of an action movie, like the heroes being bulletproof or sniper shots in the middle of a frenzied moment or gunfights lasting way, way too long. This is a measured, well-paced action movie, with extremely smart direction. When there's an explosion, there isn't three angles of it, there's just one, which adds a sense of realism and simplicity to the movie. When there's gunfire, it's short, it's ugly, and it's haphazard, just like in real life. And because it isn't set in the in the modern day (of the movie's release), but also not too far in the distant past, it doesn't feel dated in any way ... well, except maybe for a few moments where the movie goes into low frame rate slow-mo, but that's excusable. But if you also want a movie that throws up two middle fingers at the hypocrisies and atrocities of war, you got that too. The whole movie is built around a major hypocrisy: the US went there to liberate Kuwait from an invasion, but since releasing Kuwaiti prisoners of war wasn't part of the peace treaty, sorry, can't help you, the piece of paper says so. When one of the group is taken prisoner by the Iraqi Republican Guard, he learns that the leader of this platoon got his military training from visiting United States troops, when Iraq was an ally of the US during the Iran-Iraq war only a few years before the Gulf War, showing how alliances shift and change based on priority, and how hands are never clean, only a degree of dirty. A Shi'ite Iraqi rebel helps the four soldiers, and we learn that he went to college for business in the United States, came back to Iraq and operated a chain of cafes, and lost everything when they got bombed into rubble by the United States military in their efforts to liberate Kuwait. Over and over, Three Kings reminds the viewer that war isn't a clean cut good guys vs. bad guys endeavor where only the soldiers are involved; civilians are trapped in the middle, usually treated as fodder or bargaining chips, and that the objective on paper and the reality on the ground do not need to align whatsoever. Best of all is that Three Kings never feels preachy; these consequences and atrocities are presented as is and left for the viewer to decide how much collateral damage is acceptable, if alliances can be made and broken on a whim, and whether it is acceptable to use military force to "save" a country if that means also reducing them to ash and corpses in the process. It's really only in the end where the emotions tip over into sentimentality and the movie makes a misstep. I would've liked to see the movie have the courage to end how it should've (I won't spoil it). If you couldn't tell, I loved Three Kings. It's a total dad movie, and I love it unapologetically. I love Clooney being a modern day Cary Grant, I love Ice Cube's no-nonsense, no-BS-suffering attitude, I love Wahlburg's simple husband and father character, I even love Jonze's country bumpkin dumbass role. I love it all. So glad I finally saw it, and I'd happily watch it again.