Russell, who’s made two nervy independent movies, “Spanking the Monkey” and the neo-screwball “Flirting with Disaster,” is making his first big-canvas, big-studio movie, but there’s no sense of compromise. Blackly funny, unafraid to shift emotional gears from farce to horror, peppered with spectacular action, and bitingly critical of the way the U.S. abandoned the anti-Saddam resistance movement when the war was over, “Three Kings” works both as a rousing action adventure movie and as a subversion of the genre.
According to George Clooney, who plays the Special Forces mastermind of the heist, Russell’s mantra on the set was “Every bullet counts.” “He said it a billion times,” Clooney says. Russell wanted to make sure there was not one gratuitous gunshot. “Every time you see a bullet come out of a gun,” Clooney explains, “you see what it does to your insides, to your body, to your family. This is extremely responsible violence. I’m proud of that.”
When Clooney says insides, he means just that. One of the most striking shots in recent memory is a close-up of a man’s innards that shows in graphic detail exactly what happens when a bullet penetrates the body. “When I first saw it,” says costar Mark Wahlberg, whose character absorbs lead in the course of the story, “I got grossed out. I don’t even want to pick up a gun again. I see violence on TV, and I don’t look at it the way I did before.” When Russell is asked how he got such gruesomely realistic effects–were they models? computer-generated images?–he reveals his secret: it’s an actual corpse you’re seeing. “We filmed a bullet going through a cadaver,” he says. “The studio was concerned. They said, ‘If the preview audiences don’t like it, take it out.’ But the preview audiences found it fascinating.”
They won’t be alone. “Three Kings” is an adventure film with a singular, surreal personality. It takes us on a wild ride through the tangled allegiances and troubling politics of a war most of us experienced as a videogame on CNN. But instead of that Olympian aerial vantage point, Russell plunks us down on the ground, among the charred corpses and partying American soldiers who just won a war without seeing any combat. Having saved Kuwait–and its oil–the cynical ex-Green Beret Archie Gates (Clooney) thinks it’s time to cash in. He gets possession of a map that shows the location of the gold Saddam has looted from Kuwait’s sheiks and sets off to find it with his small, motley crew–Chief (Ice Cube), a deeply religious airport baggage handler from Detroit; Troy (Wahlberg), the patriot who wants to get back to his wife and daughter, and the hilariously geeky redneck Conrad Vig (Spike Jonze). First they have to make sure that scarily aggressive TV reporter Adriana Cruz (Nora Dunn) is thrown off their scent (fat chance).
Gates and his men find the gold easily enough, which is when things start to get complicated. The defeated Iraqi soldiers guarding Saddam’s loot are surprisingly willing to let them abscond with the bullion, because their first priority is to subdue the Shiite Muslim rebellion against the regime. These rebels had been encouraged by President Bush to rise up against Saddam, but now that the war was over our forces were under orders not to help them. Archie Gates and his pals can get rich–if they are willing to abandon the rebels to their certain death.
“Three Kings” is in the great Hollywood tradition of stories about hard-bitten American cynics who, when push comes to shove, find their moral backbone (hello, “Casablanca”). But there’s nothing formulaic about the way Russell tells his story. In movie terms, the gulf war is terra nova, and the director, revealing a visual imagination he hadn’t shown before, conjures strikingly original visions–burning oil fields, exploding cows, bunkers filled with VCRs and mobile phones and stolen computers, soldiers washed away in a sea of milk. There are times when its absurdist style brings to mind Richard Lester’s 1968 antiwar satire “How I Won the War;” at other times it’s casual irreverence suggests “M.A.S.H.” Using a film stock that bleaches out colors, Russell’s breathlessly paced comedy often achieves an almost hallucinatory intensity. It was a war of weird juxtapositions and ironic alliances (the Iraqi soldier who tortures his American captive learned his craft from the U.S. military, when we were backing Iraq in its war with Iran). So it’s somehow appropriate that the stars are an utterly eclectic mix–a TV star, a rapper, an ex-underwear-model-rapper, and a video and film director (Jonze)–all of whom mesh seamlessly. Clooney is a good team player here. But he still exudes an effortless, old Hollywood authority–a masculinity so comfortable with itself it doesn’t need to be insisted upon.
Russell found the heist story in Warner Bros.’s vault of unproduced screenplays. The gulf war setting reminded him of the months he had spent in Nicaragua after college “in this environment where everyone had guns and there was political chaos.” The violence and discord struck him as both horrific and hilarious. He then took 18 months to write his own script, researching the war and its aftermath, hiring experts to consult with him. If George Bush has any problems with this movie, Russell is unfazed. “I’m presenting fact,” he declares. “George Bush has said himself that he has regrets about the way the war was ended.” One of the consultants, Sgt. Maj. Jim Parker, who died of cancer during the filming of the movie, was the model for Clooney’s character. “He was so excited about the gulf war,” says Clooney. “He was like, ‘Yeah, we’re going to go stop a bad guy–and he’s definitely a bad guy’.” But Parker emerged disillusioned. “At the end of it, they would go on midnight raids and kill some of [Saddam’s] Republican Guard, because they would have to stand there during the day and let the Guard murder the Shiite Muslims.”
These are the tales the public, busy tying its yellow ribbons and watching news reports that were rigorously controlled by the Pentagon, rarely got to hear. That they should arrive in the form of a Hollywood adventure comedy is surprising. That this dark comedy manages to be both disturbingly powerful and powerfully funny is the most welcome surprise of all.
