Review: THREE KINGS

RUSSEL & JONZE STRIKE GOLD WITH THREE KINGS

(reviewed at marple 10 on Sunday, october 10th, 1999 with jack –n- stu)

    One of the best aspects of the new Gulf War dramedy, Three Kings, is the simple fact that it has everything. It has laughs, heart, action, independent style and charm, pure Hollywood popcorn elements, some great actors, and an overall wild, nuts, crazy, in-sane feel to it. Three Kings is what good film making is all about. Yes, it has a lot of minor flaws, but overall it’s a solid picture that came straight out of the Hollywood machine. Surprises apparently do still occur.
    Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube, and the hilarious scene-stealing Spike Jonze play three military brats post-Gulf War. They find a map that will lead them to gold bullion that Saddam Hussien and Iraq have stolen from Kuwait. George Clooney is an officer that finds out about the trio’s plans. He joins them and soon enough they’re off for the loot.
    The flick starts as a fun romp through the blue skied, dry-as-a-bone desert, but soon ends up as a moral victory type of film.
    The soldiers’ map leads them into an Iraquian desert village where the avergage citizens are being silenced by the strong armed Saddam army. They want their deserved freedom while the U.S. is cheering an apparently bittersweet victory.
    The plot of the film can be described as warped. It goes from one extreme to the next, and eventually plays out like a basic Hollywood film, though the outrageous style of the film is enough to realize that Three Kings is far from basic Hollywood, it’s essentially the first mainstream Independent thus far this year.
    David O. Russel and Spike Jonze deserve the most credit for this feature. Russel hit it big at Sundance with his independent incest flick, Spanking the Monkey, and later went on to direct Flirting With Disaster. For his next picture he was flipping through the Warner Brothers script collection and came upon John Ridley’s Spoils of War (Ridley wrote the novel Stray Dogs which turned into Oliver Stone’s noir film, U-Turn), a simple action film about Gulf War soldiers who find a treasure map.
    Russel studied up on the Gulf War and soon enough churned out a script that held very little resemblance to Ridley’s script. Ridley was furious about how he was treated through the ordeal. Russel admits Ridley is just mad his script has almost nothing to do with the finished flick.
    Fuck controversy, Russel knows what he is doing, no matter how much of an a-hole he is. His script is great, full of fleshed out cartoon-like but likable characters with witty lines and a lot of hilarious and furious action scenes. His filming style is wild and out-of-control in the Oliver Stone essence. He used the movie’s actual film backwards to achieve a grainy effect. He edited slow-mo techniques and closeups and shaky-cam shots.
    He knows what he’s doing.
    And speaking of knowing what you’re doing, Spike Jonze steals every frame of film he is in. Granted, Mark Wahlberg proves once again he’s a great actor, and Jamie Kennedy is pretty funny, but George Clooney and Ice Cube are just showing basic skills. Jonze started as a music video director. His biggest hits were Weezer’s ‘Buddy Holly’, Beastie Boy’s ‘Sabotage’, and Fat Boy Slim’s ‘Praise You’, where he starred as the leader of the fictional Torrance Community dance group. This fall he married Francis Ford Coppola’s daughter, Sophia Coppola (she was the Italian chick that the critics panned in The Godfather III), and his directorial debut, Being John Malkovich hits.
    Spike Jonze has been behind the scenes long enough. Finally he’s proving what a great actor he is. As Conrad, the white-collar backwoods idiot hick, he provides the majority of the humor and in the end we find that he may just be an annoying Detroit redneck, but we actually care about him.
    Jonze and Russel prove that good movies actually do come out of Hollywood. ***