The Class of 1999: 'Three Kings'
The Class of 1999: 'Three Kings'
If 'Three Kings' had been a big hit, could the United States have avoided the second Iraq war?
1999 was a historically great year for film and dramatic narrative as a whole. I’m using my 2024 to look back at, reconsider, and celebrate these stories as they all celebrate their 25th anniversaries. I recently re-reviewed American Beauty; next up on the docket is Audition. But first… it’s time for…
Three Kings - directed by David O. Russell - written by John Ridley and David O. Russell - September 27, 1999
It can be hard to remember in a post-Silver Linings Playbook world, but once upon a time, David O. Russell was one of the most exciting and creative young directors in the business. Three Kings was his third film, after the indie comedies Spanking the Monkey and Flirting with Disaster. Three Kings wasn’t just his biggest film to date, but it was also something of a departure: while it’s often very funny, I’m not sure anyone would classify it as a “comedy” per se.
In any case, Three Kings didn’t do very well when it came out, which is a shame. It’s a great movie. In fact, I sometimes wonder: if Three Kings had been a big hit, could the United States have avoided the second Iraq war?
I wonder this because Three Kings is set at the end of the first Iraq war. There, we meet Sergeant First Class Troy Barlow (Mark Wahlberg), a new father and Xerox repairman; Private First Class Conrad Vig (Spike Jonze, who directed Being John Malkovich that same year!), a not-particularly-bright redneck with a massive man crush on Troy; and Staff Sergeant Chief Elgin (Ice Cube), who is kind of your stereotypical angry/no bullshit war movie sarge. As the story begins, Troy wrongfully shoots and kills an Iraqi attempting to surrender, an action he clearly regrets despite Conrad’s mythologization of the incident.
The three men (one of whom, I guess, is not one of the titular monarchs?) soon retrieve a map a prisoner has hiding in his ass. The map purportedly leads to bunkers where Saddam Hussein is stashing gold he stole from the Kuwaitis, and garners the attention of Major Archie Gates (George Clooney). Gates is U.S. Army Special Forces, on the cusp of retirement, and he is, to put it mildly, disillusioned by this particular conflict (“Just tell me what we did here,” he furiously begs one of his superior officers early in the film). He subsequently convinces Troy, Conrad, and Chief to sneak away and take the loot for themselves.
To do this, the three kings and one other guy not only have to slip away unnoticed by the rest of the military, but they have to shake Adriana Cruz (Nora Dunn), an American journalist Gates is meant to be guiding. Gates does this by assigning Specialist Walter Wogeman (Jamie Kennedy) to lead Adriana on a wild goose chase, while distracting Captain Doug Van Meter (Holt McCallany from The Iron Claw) with attention from another journalist, Cathy Daitch (Judy Greer). Unfortunately, Adriana becomes hip to Gates’ scheme, as does Colonel Ron Horn (Mykelti Williamson), and soon they’re both in hot pursuit of the quartet of would-be gold thieves.
Still, the heist initially goes off without a hitch. But when our heroes witness one of Saddam’s guards execute an innocent woman, they feel compelled to intervene: as Gates explains, “[President George H.W.] Bush told the people to rise up against Saddam. They thought they’d have our support. Now they’re being slaughtered.” A firefight breaks out, in which several Iraqi soldiers are killed - meaning Gates and the team have just violated a ceasefire agreement.
Suddenly, things aren’t as simple as “Take the gold and run.”
Gates et al., along with a handful of Iraqi refugees, flee Saddam’s soldiers, but drive into a landmine that totals their truck. While Gates, Chief, Conrad, and the refugees are able to get away (with a good portion of the gold to boot), Troy is captured by Iraqi soldiers and brought to a bunker, where he’s tortured by Captain Said (Saïd Taghmaoui), an Iraqi soldier whose infant son was killed in his crib by an American bomb.
Meanwhile, Gates, Chief, and Conrad strike a deal with an Iraqi resistance leader, Amir (Cliff Curtis) - the man whose wife was just executed (his daughter, incidentally, is played by a 9-year-old Alia Shawkat, future star of Arrested Development and Search Party): Amir and the other refugees will help the American soldiers find Troy, and in exchange, the Americans will help the refugees reach the Iranian border and give them a portion of the gold.
While Gates and his men do eventually find and rescue Troy, his experience, terrible though it was, has instilled him with a new level of empathy for the Iraqis, and he now insists on helping the refugees.
Tragically, Conrad is shot and killed during that process. Furthermore, Colonel Horn and Captain Van Meter show up to arrest Gates, Troy, and Chief… just before they’ve gotten the refugees to the Iranian border. The trio of American soldiers agrees to give up the remaining gold in exchange for letting Amir and his fellow dissidents cross the border to safety.
Adriana reports on the story, saving our heroes from dishonorable discharge, and they go on to lead happy, healthy lives back in America; the Iraqi dissidents, meanwhile, manage to hold onto their cut of the gold, and presumably go on start new lives of their own, far from the threat of execution by Saddam’s men.
Narratively speaking, Three Kings is relatively simple and straightforward; in the hands of a lesser director, it might have just ended up being a self-impressed didactic slog, à la American Beauty (not for nothing does Russell now specialize in facile Oscar bait like American Hustle and Amsterdam). All four of the main characters have some variation of the same arc, from selfishness to altruism. And Russell’s point - that the war in Iraq was about protecting U.S. interests and not about protecting the Iraqi people from a despot is pretty darn obvious. The entire plot is, in fact, a mirror of Operation Desert Storm, only with the “correct” ending, in which the Americans realize what pricks they’ve been, and sacrifice wealth for the greater good of an oppressed population.
What elevates Three Kings is Russell’s skill as a filmmaker. For one thing, there’s the unique look of the film, as explained by the scholars at some school called Yale:
“Russell and his Director of Photography, Newton Thomas Sigel, decided to shoot some sequences using Kodak’s Ektachrome transparency stock, and, in an effort to imitate the color photos of the war that were a constant in newspapers at the time, they bypassed the bleaching stage of the film process. Without bleach, the silver image is retained, leaving a black and white image over the color image, and increasing contrast and graininess. As Russell said at the time, ‘This was the first war where we really had color pictures in newspapers, and they had this color Xerox quality to them, which is very contrasty and kind of blows out, and the color is really pumped. So that was what we sought because I think it’s a beautiful look and it also seemed to be the look of that war.’”
And yet it’s clear that Russell wasn’t aiming for stark realism. The film has no shortage of impressionistic shots: characters standing beneath impossibly fast clouds, abrupt changes in film speed, and frequent use of a 45° shutter (as opposed to the usual 180° shutter), which is what gives the movie that kind of jittery look (you’re likely most familiar with this aesthetic from Saving Private Ryan, which made it rrrrrreeeeaaallllyyyy popular for awhile in the late ‘90s and early aughts). In what may be Three Kings’ most famous sequence, Gates teaches the others all about what happens to a human body when it’s shot - by taking us inside the body.
Russell's talents extend beyond the visual. He’s known for being an extremely toxic person (Clooney called making Three Kings “truly, without exception, the worst experience of my life” - and he starred in Batman & Robin!), but he routinely gets great performances out of actors; his pacing is perfect; he’s incredibly skilled at balancing tones, which allows him to switch from comedy to drama and back again without it feeling like he’s just stitched two or three different movies together; and he sidesteps maudlin sentimentality.
Is Three Kings perfect? Of course not.
One of the biggest criticisms of Three Kings has always been that it tries to have its cake and eat it, too: it implicitly scolds action movies for glorifying violence and American exceptionalism while indulging in exciting shoot-outs and American exceptionalism. Indeed, Conrad’s death is given far more weight than that of the executed Iraqi mother, which feels pretty weird, because the story explicitly paints Conrad as a well-intentioned-but-stupid hillbilly.
In fact, the original screenplay, by John Ridley (12 Years a Slave), was inspired by The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and ended with the American soldiers all dying as a result of their own greed; the considerably more upbeat ending came about as part of Russell’s rewrites (notably, Russell also changed Gates’ race). I think it’s worth noting that Ridley is Black and Russell is White; Ridley, in other words, had very good reason to feel especially cynical about America, whereas Russell clearly wanted the audience to walk away from the film feeling pretty good about life.
Still, Three Kings felt all too relevant just a few years later, when the U.S. invaded Iraq again in 2003. Once again, American politicians used the pretense of altruism to justify selfishness; in fact, the second go-round, the reason for U.S. military “intervention” was even weaker1. Plenty of Americans protested, but plenty more bought into the propaganda about Saddam having WMDs and a connection to 9/11.
We obviously can’t know for sure if Three Kings ever had a chance of changing history for the better. But we do know for sure that it lost at the box office to a now-forgotten Ashley Judd/Tommy Lee Jones thriller, Double Jeopardy, which contributed to history only in that it gave millions of people a specious understanding of how the American legal system works. And maybe someday, if we’re really, really lucky, we’ll figure out why one of Three Kings’ magi got left out of the title.
The Class of 1999
This is an apocryphal story, but an interesting apocryphal story: Russell allegedly met George W. Bush after making Three Kings, and told the future President that the film went hard on his dad’s failure to truly free the Iraqi people… to which Bush is said to have responded, “Then I guess I'm going to have to finish the job, aren't I?”