Three Kings

365 Films

Entry #92

Three Kings (1999)

Directed by David O. Russell

I suppose it’s telling of the way we watch movies now that one of my most vivid memories of Three Kings is the moment I first became aware of it via its marketing campaign.  I was sitting in a theater in Stone Harbor about to partake in the comical shenanigans of a group of genetically modified sharks and their wacky human caretakers otherwise known as Deep Blue Sea when a trailer came on for something that appeared to take place during the Gulf War.  It had Seth Gecko, Marky Mark, and Doughboy with a visual style that could only be described as a heat-induced desert hallucination.  As I sat there trying to figure out what the hell I was looking at and how such an intriguing cinematic prospect could have slipped under my radar, I was completely bowled over by something so original and unique popping up out of nowhere in the middle of the summer doldrums.  I had not quite grasped the notion that the big, mindless spectacles were released in the summer and the more thoughtful, elegant movies for grown-ups were relegated to the fall (Three Kings was eventually released that October).  All I knew was that this movie looked thrilling, funny, and that I was smitten from the very first second of this two and a half minute trailer.  The fact that it also featured a prominently displayed Bart Simpson doll as a punctuation mark was one of the most glorious uses of an extreme close-up that I had ever seen in a theatrical advertisement.  Now I’m sure the question driving all of you to the brink of insanity right now is “what about the actual movie, you moron?”  I can assure you, Three Kings lived up to and exceeded far beyond even my lofty notions of pre-release hype.  I merely bring up this incredibly unrewarding anecdote as a way of standing in defense of the modern movie trailer.  Sure, we are bombarded by them on a daily basis and a lot of the time they give the entire game away before you even have a chance to figure out for yourself how sucky the movie is.  And there is a substantial argument to be made for and all-out ban on trailers in order to achieve some sort of critical purity when watching films, in that the only way to objectively evaluate a piece of work is to walk into it with 10,000% ignorance as your guide.  I merely wish to point out that when a trailer such as Three Kings arrives completely unannounced (I will admit that is nearly impossible these days), maintains that tricky balance of telling you enough story without giving away crucial plot details, and most importantly, does not lie about what it is, the results can be spectacularly rewarding in a way that is just as satisfying as walking into a movie cold.  What I mean to say is since movie trailers are part of the whole stupid game we play with Hollywood, it would be nice if they actually worked from time to time.  The Three Kings trailer does not pretend to be something that it is not.  You get the surreal action heist elements, you get the bulls-eye political/foreign policy satire, and you get the characters’ personal awakening at the heart of its humanistic, anti-war agenda.   A common flaw in movie marketing (especially the trailers) is how they tend to disguise and dance around a film’s more controversial elements (if those still exist in studio films anymore).  The Three Kings trailer is so refreshing because it openly embraces the traits of its film that would have been ignored by any other savvy advertisers.  This leads me to believe that somebody in that studio really fought for this movie and it might also explain why it seemed to fade from existence when released in October of 1999.  No matter, because while some films made about specific periods of time in world history tend to be either hopelessly narrow or helplessly dated, Three Kings only gets richer and more relevant as the years pass.  As we continue to remain a country perpetually at war, one of the small (very small) comforts we can take in that is how such violent chest-beating is also capable of producing wise and outraged works of art like Three Kings.