“No input, no output.”
Joe Strummer said that. It’s a mantra that always held
true for me as a writer and music journalist. Conversely, all input no output
is equally true, and the supremely exhausting and inexhaustible content vehicle
that is the internet ecosystem (an ecosystem that I feed in minimal capacities
at varying frequencies, often based on my internal hunger for and regulation of
aforementioned input, and feast upon regularly) sometimes suffocates my own desire
to offer up opinions on anything or take the time to focus and churn out
thoughtful output.
In any case, I haven’t offered up much in the way of
output in recent months, especially compared to the amount of reviews,
interviews, essays and the like I’ve written the past several years. Often, the
only time I feel desire enough to put something out there these days is when I believe
I have an opinion I haven’t read a hundred times on a dozen rival content-churning
sites cranked out a dozen times a day, headlined and linked like baited hooks
for people to read what they already know and have consumed in five
ever-so-slightly differently-worded ways.
Perhaps all of this is neither here nor there. Maybe
it’s an expositional means to say my some of my inputs of late have consisted
of the usual news coverage of ISIS attacks, 2016 presidential bids, Donald
Trump, the Clintons, the Bushes, Obama, American foreign policy, Snowden, and
the excellent, Goodfellas-esque new
Netflix series Narcos, which
chronicles Pablo Escobar’s tyrannical empire in Colombia and the longstanding
DEA campaign to capture and extradite him. All of those inputs compound with my
steady diet of a dozen or so records, films and books a week. For whatever
reason, this particular cocktail has me thinking about (in various indirect
ways) Three Kings, the 1999
war-heist-action-satire-drama written and directed by David O. Russell.
Three
Kings, a non-franchise Warner Brothers mid-level studio
film (the sort of film that is an endangered species at best in 2015), was one
of those movies that garnered critical acclaim and awards consideration
(National Board of Review Top 10 Film of 1999, Broadcast Film Critics
Association nomination for Best Picture) and was met with a middling box office
performance ($60 million domestic gross and $107 million worldwide gross on a
$75 million budget *according to Box Office Mojo), but I rarely hear anybody
mention the film.
Many other acclaimed films from 1999 come up in
conversation more frequently, and several remain relevant, hold up beautifully
and are pretty much perfect (American
Beauty, Magnolia, Fight Club, Being John Malkovich**) while others feel almost cryogenically
frozen and neutered thanks to their initial success and the parade of copycats
that followed in their wake (The Matrix,
The Blair Witch Project, The Sixth Sense).
What makes Three
Kings great to me is I loved it when I first saw it in theaters as a 17-year-old
kid in 1999, it retained its unique power with each successive DVD viewing soon
after, and it has only grown more relevant as time has passed in post 9/11,
War-on-Terror-entrenched America. All of that hardly takes into account
writer-director David O. Russell’s career is hotter than ever, and the quartet
of actors at the center of the action and drama in Three Kings were all making varying degrees of changes in their
career arcs at that very moment, and the film allowed each of them to branch
out and impress in new ways, even if it now could almost, given the trajectory
of their successes over the years, seem like a memory of a memory to those who
haven’t seen or revisited the film.
One of the things that makes Three Kings special and particularly relevant is that is set on
familiar turf to many of the films that followed in the next fifteen years, but
it bears no resemblance to any of them. It exists as neither a forbearer nor an
outlier. Though released in theaters less than two years before the 9/11
attacks and set less than a decade prior, the outlandishly strange and ominous
mental, political, and physical climate Three
Kings captures is an intricate work of pulpy war-noir that serves as a
puzzle piece linking together myriad trends that had/have coalesced in American
culture, the media, and military affairs since. Its Gulf War narrative is portentous
of American involvement in the Middle East in the 21st Century while
planting its roots in the very recent past of the peculiar Gulf War proceedings
of Bush era 1990 and 1991. Supremely villainous tyrant Saddam with cartoonish
proportions in American culture (substitute Osama bin Laden of the mid-00s, Escobar,
or even a Trump-ish persona consumed by megalomania, intimidation, media
influence, unthinkable wealth, and varying levels of unchecked brutality)
terrorizes the dissenting population while simultaneously presenting himself as
a sacred idol and philanthropist. It’s in this context that a quartet of mismatched
American soldiers of varying rank, race, education, and background
inadvertently come upon a treasure map of Saddam’s millions in gold bullion and
fashion themselves into a ragtag group of covert bandits in hotbed of political
turmoil, surreal cultural divides, and constant threat of violent outbursts.
It’s a one of a kind film (a textbook example of
genre-defying, a class in which Russell has often excelled) that deftly moves
with brazen attitude, wisecracking wit, unsettling violence, suspense, complex
moral dilemmas, empathy, redemption and melancholy. The razor-sharp direction,
the chemistry between the actors, and script all sing and sting, while what
starts as an offbeat heist flick (a reimagining of the 1970 Clint Eastwood film
Kelly’s Heroes) and segues into a
potboiler of spitfire satire, idealistic noir and compelling human drama on
foreign soil that has only become more unrelentingly war-ravaged and hopelessly
volatile in the years since. Hence, the litany of (mostly independent to
mid-level studio) films indebted to America’s involvement in the Middle East
post 9/11, ranging from overlooked, contemplative gems (The Messenger, Fort Bliss),
heart-pounding action flicks that were box office smashes (American Sniper, Lone
Survivor), Best Picture-winning (and Avatar/James
Cameron-slaying) masterworks of suspense (The
Hurt Locker), a great film railroaded by political agenda (Zero Dark Thirty) white-knuckle
actioners that didn’t become American
Sniper-sized monoliths (The Kingdom),
and mostly forgotten hot-button-issue indies chronicling the tolls on veterans
at home and abroad (Stop-Loss, Jarhead, In the Valley of Elah), are all set on soil similar to Three Kings, but Russell’s film acts
like its own subversive, yet heartfelt, beast. It’s a cinematic entertainment
with historical context and a long arm of relevance, but it lives in the unsettled
land between straightforward popcorn flick and history lesson.
Three
Kings’ long, if largely unmentioned, shelf life owes much
to the careers of its principals. David O. Russell is currently one of the
hottest directors in Hollywood thanks to his recent ensemble flicks that have
blended Academy Awards bait with box office appeal primarily thanks to the
pairing of Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper and the success of Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle. Yes, The Fighter (my favorite film of 2010)
garnered a heap of major award nominations and wins and performed well at the
box office, but the lightning in a bottle pairing of Lawrence and Cooper as
leads tapped some sort of mainstream zeitgeist thanks to the major success of The Hunger Games trilogy, American Sniper, Guardians of the Galaxy, and the current standing of Lawrence as America’s
sweetheart. Even with the impressive string of critical and commercial hits
with Hustle, Playbook, The Fighter,
and given that his breakout film was the delirious, excellent comedy Flirting with Disaster starring Ben
Stiller, I’ll still argue Three Kings
is both an outstanding work of American cinema and David O. Russell’s finest
film. Additionally, Three Kings helped solidify George Clooney as a legitimate
leading man and charismatic movie star (in tandem with 1998’s Out of Sight, directed by Steven
Soderbergh) as opposed to merely America’s favorite TV doctor, turned Marky Mark
into a serious actor (alongside his breakout role as Dirk Diggler in Paul
Thomas Anderson’s brilliant Boogie Nights,
even if that role could be misconstrued as a coming-of-age porn star version of
Marky Mark himself), allowed Ice Cube to act in a role beyond the genre comedy
of Friday, the genre dramas of Boyz ‘n the Hood and Higher Learning, and the B-movie (at
best) action of Anaconda, and offered
Spike Jonze (whose own masterpiece, Being
John Malkovich, also hit theaters in 1999) his first significant role in
front of the camera.
Amongst the wealth of great films released in 1999, Three Kings had a niche, but it rarely
gets mentioned in conversation nowadays, either as one of great movies of the
late ‘90s, as a newer classic that went under the radar for many, or as a film
that deserves being revisited given its exponentially increased cultural
relevance over the years – both as a captivating fictional document of American
politics and military action and as somewhat of a launching pad for career
reinventions of many of its principals.
**Eyes Wide Shut, but that vastly
misunderstood/underrated Kubrick elegy is for another essay
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