Netflix It! Three Kings: Movie, DVD Review

Editor's Note: Netflix It is a feature meant to draw attention to older films some readers might have missed, and might consider either renting or adding to their Netflix queue, or renting at their local DVD store. The following review of "Three Kings," never published here before, is the original 1999 review.


Right up until its final moments, David Russell’s “Three Kings” does what the best movies do--it trust its audience completely.

There’s no time for hand-holding here. The film is on a mission, one that defies genre categorization because it knows too much about the absurdities of life and the lunacy of war to be pigeonholed so neatly.

This is the sort of film that finds shock and hilarity in blowing up a wayward cow lost in the deserts of Iraq, only to completely change tone moments later with the disturbing, graphic execution of frightened Kuwaiti woman pleading for her life.

Is “Three Kings” a comedy? A morality tale? A war movie? It’s all three--and then some. As dark as “Apocalypse Now,” “Full Metal Jacket” and “The Deer Hunter,” it has one essential difference: Unlike those films, this film isn’t so much about comprehending war, as it is about exploiting war for personal gain--first monetarily, then spiritually.

The film is set in March 1991, immediately after the Gulf War, which, as CNN showed every hour on the hour for several months, differed from Vietnam in that it was mostly fought with high-tech weaponry.

Push a button, obliterate a bunker. Flip a switch, cripple Saddam’s army. For those ground troops sent overseas to halt Hussein’s infiltration of Kuwait, much of their time was spent in the desert waiting for some sort of ground action to happen--which, for the most part, it didn’t.

To Russell’s great credit, he nevertheless leaps into what could have been a dull, dry cinematic terrain and mines a terrific story out of it.

The film follows four men (George Clooney, Ice Cube, Mark Wahlberg, Spike Jonze) who go AWOL in search of the gold bullion Saddam Hussein has stolen from Kuwait. It is about their greed, their thievery, and finally their morality.

Grade: A-