2010-10-18

Three Kings

Three Kings (David O. Russell, 1999)


A film can be described by its advertisement: George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube and Spike Jonze. Here you have the main characters of your movie, a war satire on the Koweit liberation from the power of Saddam's Irak. 


Quickly the story that was about four opportunists wanting to take the gold that has been stole from the hands of the Koweit and keep it for their own profit changes into a deeper human values centered plot in some kind of an excuse of being on the territory for petrol. David O. Russell doesn't try to dictate to Americans that they were the "bad" ones in that conflict neither did he wanted to do the opposite. He does something even better than dictate or criticizing the American acts on Irak grounds, he sets his story in the middle of all that. The different points of views are expressed by the moralistic journalist, the other side from the torturer once father, and the greed of the privates may represent how the petrol was the main issue of the war.

A positive point from this view of Three Kings is how amusing the story is and how the message as moralist as it is passes well and doesn't seem too heavy on Americans. It's like a Trojan horse from the inside, a very American film tells to Americans how they behave in 1991 was not "nice" and how they should care more about the civilians and the people that are human beings just like them, fathers, sons, brothers, mothers, etc. The interesting thing about this film is that it came out in 1999 and George W. Bush decided to go back in Irak two years later in late 2001 after the sad day of September 11. With some retrospect Three Kings has its flaws but nonetheless tells an interesting point of view in a funny War satire format.

If you enjoyed Three Kings I recommend an essential viewing of Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, a personal favorite.

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