The year 1999 was, quite famously, a good one for movies. Even the best blockbusters felt political, and more importantly, their themes and ideas felt particularly urgent. Three Kings was one such movie that was beloved at the time, and its stature has only grown in the years since it was first released.
The film, which stars George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, and Ice Cube, follows four soldiers at the conclusion of the Gulf War who decide to attempt a heist before leaving the Middle East for good. Directed by David O. Russell, the movie is an angry political war cry, but one that mixes comedy, action, and sincere drama to great effect. Here are five reasons you should make time for it.
The movie is a metaphor for the entire Gulf War
This story, which follows a group of soldiers who decide to rob Saddam Hussein’s gold reserves and ultimately get roped into helping the local population fend off a group of raiders, is fairly easy to read as the story of the Gulf War in miniature. The way many see it, the U.S. invaded Kuwait only to preserve its own oil interests, and stopped well short of actually taking down Saddam Hussein.
Of course, actually taking down Hussein proved to be a mess of an entirely different magnitude, but Three Kings remains fascinating in part because it seems to understand that its central characters are not acting out of any sort of moral purpose, but only out of their own instincts for survival.
George Clooney has rarely been better
George Clooney is one of the great movie stars of his era, and Three Kings features one of his very best performances. Here, he’s playing Archie Gates, a career soldier on the verge of retirement who is disillusioned with the war and with notions of American greatness more generally. Clooney has always been good as the competent cynic, and that’s exactly the role he gets to play here.
He may not have gotten along with Russell while they were making this movie, but it’s undeniably one of his best performances. Clooney also elevates everyone around him, including Wahlberg and Ice Cube, who are both doing career-best work as well.
It’s directed with genuine invention
Russell’s career has taken many twists and turns in the decades since Three Kings, but this remains the movie in which he seemed most interested in stylistic invention. The movie’s action sequences feature slow-motion, and the camera is often focused on elements that would be ignored in a typical sequence.
What’s more, the entire film has strange, slightly surreal color-grading largely because of the way it was shot and processed, and all of that makes the movie feel remarkable, even by the standards of the era. Not every choice Russell made here works, but it’s hard to deny that he was always trying something new.
It’s angry and ambiguous
Three Kings is an action movie, a comedy, and a drama, but behind each of those elements is an underlying rage. The movie seems to reflect the views of Clooney’s main character, who is utterly exhausted by America’s interventionalist streak and furious that we had claimed victory while leaving a mess in our wake.
What’s more, Three Kings seems to understand that, while America’s politicians may justify war with lofty rhetoric, America’s soldiers are mostly just grunts working jobs. This is a movie that rails against the reasons we make war as much as it rages against this war in particular, and its acerbic sense of humor is a huge part of its central argument.
It manages to be genuinely funny
You might not expect a movie that is mostly about how stupid the Gulf War was to also be funny, but Russell manages to balance the movie’s tones beautifully. Whereas the anger of the movie comes from how it’s told, the comedy comes from the interpersonal dynamics between its central characters.
Clooney’s cynical major often finds himself at odds with his less educated, less experienced soldiers, and their desperate attempts to improvise their way out of a situation they should not be in are a huge part of why the movie doesn’t feel like a total bummer.
Three Kings can be rented or purchased on Amazon Prime Video.
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