When Three Kings, a movie about the 1991 Gulf War, was released in 1999 no one knew that there would be a subsequent war with Iraq, beginning in 2003. Yet the film is certainly prescient about what was to come. In defending America’s decision to leave the region, one character asks another if he’d like, instead, to occupy Iraq and have another Vietnam. Topicality isn’t why Three Kings is so good, though it remains a fascinating marker of the times. The movie is blatantly critical of the first President Bush, by name, which probably precludes Bush-family fans from seeing it as anything more than a scolding from liberal Hollywood. Yet its points are made on human terms and with humor that is dark and idiosyncratic but not smug. Three Kings, a good candidate for the best American film of its year, was well received by critics, though less so by the public, and its reputation has been steadily on the rise. Politics aside, it’s a bold, inventive genre-bender, a war film that combines ironic comedy, heist thriller, action-star antics, and farcical situations, set against a surreal landscape and a gravely serious situation. Three Kings is quite a ride because it takes u-turns, detours, and maneuvers dead ends, colliding with bald reality in a way it never could have if its central characters had behaved like conventional soldiers. It’s similar to Gunga Din (1939), another dizzily comic war film in which three soldiers are swept inside the chaos of war. But Gunga Din and other Rudyard Kipling-based adventure films (like John Ford’s 1937 Wee Willie Winkie) were paeans to British imperialism, whereas Three Kings is no hymn to American foreign policy.

excerpted from John DiLeo’s
Screen Savers: 40 Remarkable Movies Awaiting Rediscovery
© 2008 Hansen Publishing Group. All Rights Reserved.