It has become chic in modern Tarantino-inspired cinema to glorify screen violence with ultra-hip stylistics while keeping an emotional distance from the victims. It is refreshing then to look back at Three Kings, a post-Pulp Fiction Gulf War fable that uses equally impressive techniques to show the horror, rather than the glamour, of bloodshed.
Three Kings opens with a group of American troops who, in the last days of the Gulf War, have yet to see any real "action." An Iraqi soldier appears in the distance, paradoxically pointing a gun and waving a white flag. "Are we shooting?" Sgt. Troy Barlow (Mark Wahlberg) asks his cohorts. Unable to obtain an answer, Barlow blows the Iraqi away.
Then, after approaching the man he has just killed -- who is gasping his last few bloody breaths -- Barlow hangs his head in shame.
This sequence is representative of the moral ambiguity in which director David O. Russell casts the Gulf War in this film. Cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel and he have photographed their soldier/mercenaries -- who include, along with Barlow, coolheaded Capt. Archie Gates (George Clooney), stalwart Sgt. Chief Elgin (Ice Cube), and doltish Pfc. Conrad Vig (Spike Jonze) -- in a semi-documentary style that is at times so heavily sun-bleached that one's first impression is to suspect the film was accidentally overexposed. Yet it soon becomes clear these distortions are intentional. As the soldiers squint in this blinding sunlight, they seem to be searching to discern an ethical imperative in a war of tangled wherefores so intricate that 12 years later, we are still trying to get them straight.
It is because of this ambivalence about the war that Gates, Barlow, Elgin and Vig are susceptible to pursuing their own selfish motives in the form of a lucky opportunity that has come their way: a map with coordinates to a bunker filled with Kuwaiti bullion Saddam stole.
They are eventually faced with war's cruel reality, however, when in the midst of their gold-stealing heist, Saddam's troops violently put down a revolt by Iraqi freedom fighters. Consumed by shame and empathy, they try to aid the Iraqis. In the process, the cease-fire is broken and many shots are fired, leaving people wounded on both sides. The war suddenly becomes less about opportunism for these four U.S. soldiers and more about trying to do the right thing.
Violent scenes like this one are depicted in a brutally real, unsensationalistic way like its predecessor Saving Private Ryan. But unlike Saving Private Ryan, each killing in Three Kings is allowed its own horrific dignity. Bullets fly in tense slow motion and hit their targets with a palpable, destructive thud. Russell has enough respect for his victims on both sides to slow the action scenes down rather than speed them up so we are forced to absorb the morbid gruesomeness inherent in combat.
Three Kings is probably more appropriate now than ever. Regardless of one's opinion of the current war, Russell's movie informs what should be a universal concern of everyone as innocents linger in the aftermath of a now-devastated country. Opportunism or convenience cannot allow us to lose sight of the people for whom we say we are fighting. Three Kings forces us to empathize with their plight and it is an affecting, important movie for it.
