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Royal blood >> Three Kings land in the Gulf War
by MATTHEW HAYS
It's been eight years since the Gulf War, in which the world swooped down on an Iraq that had invaded Kuwait, and here's Three Kings, a film which, at least tangentially, comments on the war. The main plotline itself isn't really about the war. Instead, it's about three military buddies (Mark Wahlberg, George Clooney and Ice Cube) who, after Saddam has cried uncle, decide there's a fast buck to be made before returning home. It seems Hussein's forces have stashed hundreds of gold bricks stolen from the Kuwaitis, gold which will find its way back to the neighbouring country now that the war is won. But Clooney thinks a simple foray into the desert, a nabbing of as much of the gold as is possible (it wasn't theirs in the first place anyway, he reasons), and the crew can live out the American dream--wealth without a day job. Naturally, heists in movies never work out the way they're supposed to; trouble ensues. For all of that predictability, the film delivers more surprises than its promotional poster might suggest. Filmmaker David O. Russell (Spanking the Monkey, Flirting With Disaster) works to keep the action moving, the irony at full tilt and throws in some unusual stylistic touches (we're treated to a what-your-insides-look-like-when-you've-been-hit-by-a-bullet sequence). Unfortunately, Three Kings also relies a bit too heavily on the spate of A-list director Vietnam films. The checklist has been met: there are the top-40 hit parade numbers, the irony-laden images of the Stars and Stripes (unbridled patriotism leads to war, dontcha know) and the revelations U.S. soldiers happen upon when they realize those "towel heads" aren't so bad, after all. It's a tiresome exercise, ultimately. The three leads (buoyed by supporting performances by Nora Dunn and Spike Jonze) do their best, but the anti-war message--that we should have been thinking about poor civilians rather than spending so much energy being greedy--is seriously obvious, and Russell's earnest efforts at concocting a radical departure from the genre fall short.
Three Kings opens Friday, October 1 |
It has been convincingly argued that the Hollywood studios, as cowardly as they are, often avoid contemporary controversies. Vietnam and AIDS, in particular, were two subjects the studios shied away from dealing with directly for years (opting instead for metaphor).