Three Kings

And I’m still on a roll.

After complaining about not seeing this in my last review, I found out that it was still playing for a couple more days nearby, so I had to check it out. And I’m glad I did.

As far as I know, this is the second major Desert Storm movie to come out of Hollywood. The other one was Courage Under Fire, which I thought was quite good. That one brought the emotional horrors of post-war to us. This one goes a little further and brings the horrors of the actual war to us in a way that, while this war wasn’t exactly the worst in the way of casualties (we only lost, what, 6 men over there?), it had it’s own horrors to deal with.

Archie Gates (George Clooney showing that he can really act when he wants to) is an opportunistic soldier who is retiring in three days when he finds out that someone has found a map to some of Saddam Hussein’s gold in an Iraqi soldier’s, er, very uncomfortable place. (What, like the back of a Volkswagen?) Troy Barlow (Marky Mark Mark Wahlberg showing that he can act even without plastic appendages) is a new family man who just wants to get home to his wife and baby when he finds the map. Conrad Vig (Spike Jonze who seems to be able to act almost as well as he can direct) is a lost little Southern boy who idolizes Troy maybe a little too much. He’ll follow him anywhere. Chief Elgin (Ice Cube finally showing that he can act as long as you don’t make him work on Fridays) is a spiritual guy who sees that God has put this gold in front of him for a reason.

Now, you may wonder why these guys could get away with just running around Iraq and steal gold. Well, it’s the end of the way and there’s a cease fire going. That’s how they’re not getting shot. Also, Saddam stole the gold from Kuwait, so they’re just stealing it back. If it happens to go missing when the Kuwaitis are looking for it, Saddam must have hidden it really well. And, by the way, he’s lying when he says that some American soldiers stole it from him.

Somehow it seems like it would work. And I think it would have if they hadn’t all grown consciences. That’s the heart of the movie. Yeah, these guys are pretty much just greedy bastards at first, but when they start seeing the Iraqi soldiers beating on the citizens, The Dude cannot abide. (Lebowski fans of the world unite!) These poor people are being killed just because they want a fair country to live in. America told them that they would help the rebellion, but they’ve left. There are no extra men for a pathetic rebellion.

What to do? Get as many out as you can. Even if it means putting yourself in the line of danger, losing some of the gold and disobeying the cease fire.

So that’s the story in a nutshell. (And what a big nut it was.) There’s also Nora Dunn as a reporter looking for her big story and Jamie Kennedy (Scream 1 & 2) trying to run her around so that she’ll never find Archie and the boys. They’re important, but not really until the end.

The story’s been done before, but what keeps this one afloat (besides the acting) is the heart and the direction. It’s all shot almost like a documentary. Very grainy with some scenes so bright you can’t see what’s behind the people on the screen. (It is the desert after all.) If I didn’t know the difference between Clooney and Schwartzkopf I would think that the film crew were actually in the Iraqi desert. David O. Russell (Spanking The Monkey and Flirting With Disaster) makes it seem maybe a little too real.

Then, of course, there’s some pretty weird violence. (It is a war movie, right?) There are shots of what a bullet really does to the human body as it goes through it. Pretty nasty stuff, but definitely visually interesting.

Then there’s the fact that there really aren’t any bad guys. Yes, the Iraqis are supposed to be the bad guys, but we get their side of it, too. When one of our heroes gets captured and tortured we hear the story of Captain Said (Said Taghmaoui from Hideous Kinky) and his family and how the Americans bombed them into the middle of last century. We start to maybe feel a little for these poor guys. Not really enough to wish that our boys weren’t the heroes, but enough to know that it really wasn’t our war. We were really only there for the oil.

Through it all there’s a sense of fun. How is that, you might ask? Come on. It’s Clooney. He can’t be in a movie without having some fun, right? For the most part, these guys are just kids on a vacation. Yeah, they’re at war, but they never really shoot anybody. When Troy actually does at near the beginning, he seems a little sickened by it while everyone else is whooping and hollering. Anyway, they have time for fun because there’s not a lot of danger until the middle of the movie. Before that they’re throwing Nerf footballs and shooting them like skeet, blowing up cows, having sex with hot female co-anchors…whatever floats their boats.

There’s really only one thing that I can find wrong with the movie. (This is kind of a spoiler, but not really. We all know it happens, we just don’t know who. The movie is called THREE Kings, not Four.) When one of our heroes is shot in the shoulder he dies from his wound pretty quickly. You know, I’ve seen plenty of people live through a shot like that. It went right above his shoulder blade. They couldn’t save him and yet they could save the guy who got shot just below the lung. How does that work?

This movie really brought the war film into the 21st Century. With all of the media help and documentary/news story style of shooting, this movie made it real without making it too sentimental. I remember seeing a lot of this war on tv. Especially shots of bombs going into buildings and seeing what kind of damage they did, much like the bullets ripping through the people’s stomachs in this movie. That’s what made the movie real. And that’s what made the war seem not so real.