by Curtis Edmonds -- blueduck@hsbr.org
Three Kings is the story of Major Archie Gates (George Clooney), Army Special Forces, and his role in the Gulf War. When Major Gates hears that three recruits have found a treasure map embedded in the derriere of an Iraqi prisoner, he takes immediate action. He confiscates the map from the recruits, telling them that it's a matter of national security. Then, with the aid of a company of airborne infantry troops and three Apache headquarters, he leads a daring raid to capture the stolen Kuwaiti gold and return it to its rightful owners, thereby earning the thanks of Congress, a promotion, and a Silver Star.
Well, OK, so that's not how the movie actually goes. But maybe it should have.
Three Kings is showing up on a lot of year-end top ten lists now, for reasons that I just can't fathom. My difficulty in liking Three Kings stems from a pivotal disagreement I have with a central premise of the movie: that soldiers are stupid.
Three Kings has almost a Clintonesque loathing for the American military, and its prejudice against men in uniform shows up most clearly in the stupid things that its characters are made to do. Clooney's character is supposedly a Special Forces soldier, which should imply a high degree of training and intelligence. However, the script has him team up with three incredibly green reservists on a mad dash through enemy territory to steal several tons of gold... without a thought as to the logistics of the thing. (How do you get that much gold in a Hum-Vee? How do you get it home?) Gates apparently expects that the Iraqis will hand over the gold -- and such is the irrationality of the script that that's what happens.
Gates's compatriots don't have much going on upstairs themselves. Mark Wahlberg, young and naive and clueless in Boogie Nights, has the same characteristics here, except that he gets to keep his clothes on. Wahlberg's character attempts to call for help at one point on a captured cell phone, and can't remember the name of his unit. "You know," he tells the operator. "The big army. Out in the desert." Director Spike Jonze is saddled with a character that's sub-moronic (the movie's one truly funny scene shows Jonze back in civilian life, blowing away stuffed animals with a shotgun) and and accent that is supposed to be Texan but is not. Ice Cube's sergeant is the most level headed of the crew, but he nearly makes a fatal error when the crew comes under chemical attack. And these are the soldiers that Major Gates has watching his back.
Here's a further example: on the way out of camp, the recruits so some skeet shooting with Nerf footballs. This, you would think, would not be the best way to start a mission that's supposed to be covert. Clooney recognizes this as silliness, and proceeds to try to train his troops. To do this, he uses a dairy cow... which just happens to be wandering around alone in the desert... and no one thinks that it just might be booby trapped.
Three Kings superficially resembles The Blair Witch Project, with a small band of unprepared innocents heading out into the great unknown to seek out an evil There's a lot of handheld camera work in Three Kings, and some of the scenes are even shot using a really cheap camera. (The desert sunshine washes out the colors on the cheap film.) But instead of twig figures and piles of rocks, the symbols of evil in Three Kings are garish, amateur murals of Saddam Hussein plastered on the walls of the various bunkers in the movie. One even shows Saddam wearing an incongruous mortarboard, just as if he had graduated from the Baghdad Institute for Evil Dictators.
But the filmmakers, again displaying their liberal prejudices, spend much more time reviewing the supposed evils of the United States. The US is as much of a Great Satan in Three Kings as Saddam. Characters continually wonder what the purpose of the war is. President Bush is (with the advantage of hindsight) repeatedly excoriated for his failure to support the Iraqi rebels in a coup attempt against Saddam. The whole "blood for oil" slander is repeated, graphically, by an Iraqi terrorist pouring motor oil down Mark Wahlberg's throat. (To its credit, however, the movie allots at least some of its satire to the silliness of the news media -- an easy target if ever there was one.)
There haven't been a great deal of Gulf War movies made. The only one I can think of offhand was Courage Under Fire, which celebrated the heroism of a female helicopter pilot (Meg Ryan) whose memory was under attack by chauvinist brutes. Likely, we won't see many more. The Gulf War was such a shattering triumph for America and its allies that it's difficult for Hollywood liberals to use it to denigrate the American military and American values. Three Kings accomplishes that difficult feat to a degree, but that's a reason to bury it, not to praise it. This boring, overlong, pretentious movie does a disservice to the American soldier and the American audience alike.
-- Curtis Edmonds blueduck@hsbr.org
Movie Reviews: http://www.hsbr.org/buzz/reviewer/reviews/bdreviews.html http://www.epinions.com/user-curtisedmonds
"JANUARY 1, 1000: This was the historic day that humanity celebrated the dawn of our current millennium. The occasion was marked by feasting, dancing, and the public beheading of a whiny, tedious group of people who would not stop insisting that, technically, the new millennium did not begin until January 1, 1001." -- Dave Barry
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