by Billy Russell, Staff Writer

Anything can be a comedy, as long as you know what to mine for the humor.  War and comedy go back to the very beginning of film.  Buster Keaton’s The General is still rightfully heralded as a classic.  Hell, even Laurel and Hardy through their decades as a duo made many, many shorts and features, from WWI to WWII.

When Three Kings came out in 1999, a year filled with great movies, I remember it being one of my favorites that year.  Three Kings is a movie that delicately balances a number of tones without ever losing sight of itself. It’s funny, it’s dramatic, it’s harrowing and, most importantly, it’s human. When this movie came out, I remember thinking, this David O. Russell guy… he’s going places.

That mostly didn’t happen, but Three Kings still remains one of my favorite movies, directed by someone who’s a real piece of shit. Once upon a time, though, Russell was a director to watch out for. I never saw his debut, Spanking the Monkey, but I’ve heard it’s a decent, uncomfortable viewing with some solid writing and some damn good performances, especially from Jeremy Davies. I did see Flirting With Disaster, which is a very specific type of 90s comedy with a stacked cast and a bonkers plot that goes all in on its zaniness. Your mileage may vary, but I thought Flirting With Disaster was a good time, with an amazing cast who give it their all. I even adore I <3 Huckabees.  It ain’t perfect, but it tries damn hard and mostly succeeds.

Three Kings will likely forever be considered David O. Russell’s masterpiece, and deservedly so. The screenplay, written by Russell, with a story credit to John Ridley (which had a whole behind-the-scenes drama to it), borrows its basic plot from Kelley’s Heroes: it’s a war movie, a comedy, and a heist film. But this is just the starting-off point for a film that will explore American patriotism, and its claim to be the Police Force of the World.

Three Kings begins as the Gulf War is ending in 1991.  Most of the characters we’re introduced to saw little or no action. They’re mostly interrupting their daily lives back home in the States. Most of us only ever experienced the war through the newspaper, so the film mimics the harsh blues and washed-out whites that had been printed. The process of mimicking this look involved using Ecktachrome slide transparency film. Today, this look would be accomplished digitally, but the film process the filmmakers use looks incredible.

After discovering a map to a literal treasure trove in an Iraqi soldier’s ass, our gang of U.S. Army misfits sets about stealing gold from Saddam Hussein, to make their time in this desert, during this conflict, worth it to them. Along for the ride is an army major, who hears wind of this scheme, and wants in on it, too. He knows they’ll never be able to accomplish this without a high-ranking officer.

This being a movie, of course, their plan does not go according to plan. People die. A civilian is executed by an Iraqi soldier and our good guy Americans can’t stand to see it happen, so they get involved, and everything goes to hell. One of their men is captured, the U.S. Army itself gets involved, and the whole thing becomes one big mess.

At the start of the film, our soldiers look upon the Kuwaiti and Iraqi people with disdain. They spit racist insults at them. As the film ends, as they’ve all been forced to learn and to grow, they view them as the struggling, all-too-real humans that they actually are.  And they begin to view the war itself differently. The film is openly critical of the operation for not doing more to help the people. It would only be a few years later when the U.S. was involved in yet another conflict with Iraq, one that would last much, much longer than the Gulf War ever did.

Three Kings is a Great movie with a capital “G”. It boasts some big laughs, some bigger gasps and shows us the consequences of violence by taking us inside the human body to view the havoc a bullet can wreak on someone. A wound one more would consider “superficial” here kills one of our main characters—a bullet to the collarbone, deadly in real life, and considered a flesh wound in a Rambo picture. Three Kings, moreso than so many other movies of this genre, understands the fragility of the human body. When we see a bullet hit someone in the chest, inside their bodies were see air collapsing their lung.

The cast here is amazing, and for most of them, they’ve rarely done better. George Clooney plays a variation on himself, as he always does, with a swagger and a smarmy charm. Mark Wahlberg puts in a top-five performance here, as does Ice Cube. And Spike Jonze is perfect for the comic relief, it’s sort of surprising he didn’t do more with acting, but that year he saw even greater success as a director with Being John Malkovich. 

Three Kings is a masterwork from a filmmaker giving it their all.  David O. Russell poured himself into this movie, and you can see the energy and the passion for this project in every frame, from beginning to end—from it’s off-kilter camera angles, to the comradery of the cast and their playful dialogue.