Three Kings

WHAT WENT WRONG - Sad Boom Media

A deep dive into the 1999 film 'Three Kings,' directed by David O. Russell, exploring its complex narrative, standout performances, and tumu

Key takeaways

• David O. Russell's 'Three Kings' is praised as his best film by both hosts, despite later acclaim for movies like 'Silver Linings Playbook.'
• The film masterfully blends dark satire with moments of idealism, though the final third is seen as less inspired and more predictable.

Main topics

• The creative vision and direction of David O. Russell
• Performance analysis: Mark Wahlberg, George Clooney, Ice Cube, Spike Jonze

Notable quotes

"I think this might be Mark Wahlberg's best performance." – Lizzie Bassett

Conclusion

Despite its uneven final act and challenging production, 'Three Kings' remains a bold,

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:20) Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to another episode of What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone, I would say, a very good one shot in the desert with kids and also maybe Hollywood's bitchiest director. As always, I am Chris Winterbauer, joined by my co-host Lizzie Bassett. Lizzie, where are we going? And who are we maybe going to have to hit in the face when we get there? Thank you so much, Chris. Speaker 4 (0:52) I'm actually not sure that bitchy is a strong enough word Speaker 2 (0:54) to describe Speaker 4 (0:55) the director we're talking about today. We are, of course, talking about Three Kings. I'm very excited to get into this movie. It's a great movie, and it's an absolutely wild story. But before we get into this, if you're enjoying this podcast and you want more of it... You can have it. You can now subscribe in both Apple and Spotify where you can get bonus episodes, at least one bonus episode every month. Usually it's more. We've been really enjoying these. We're covering new movies that are coming out. We're talking about our opinions on them. It's been really, really fun. You can also now get an ad-free feed. Just so you know, if you do subscribe in Apple, that ad-free feed will come up a little bit later than it will on Spotify and on Patreon. And of course, you can, for $5 a month, join our Patreon community where you will get everything I just mentioned and more. So if you like the show, please consider becoming a subscriber. It's worth it, I promise. All right. Now, Chris, I have to ask you. What was your experience with Three Kings prior to today? And then what was it re-watching it for the podcast? Speaker 2 (1:53) You know, I think I had actually only seen this once fully through before. I watched it in high school. It's one of the many phenomenal films, in my opinion, to come out of 1999. Yeah, crazy year. And I have distinct memories of a lot of the cinematography, which we can talk about in this movie. There is a sort of bleach bypass, speed ramp, time lapse, you know, music video, punk rock quality to this movie that I really appreciate. And so rewatching it, I wondered if it might feel dated as a result because so much of it felt of the time. Obviously, it is set against the first Gulf War. So the beginning of the 1990s. I got to say, I thought it held up really well. I think the performances are really good in this movie. I think these actors are all being used. to their respective strengths in a lot of ways, which is really smart. I think the writing is surprisingly incisive for the time. I, in particular, think the first half of this movie to two-thirds is pretty exceptional. And then in the final third, I just find that some of the payoffs to some of the plants earlier start to feel less inspired and perhaps a little more predictable as the movie kind of rounds the corner. I also think as it moves from sort of dark, biting black comedy satire into something somewhat more idealistic. It's not that I mind it. I always like an optimistic movie, but it does feel like the message starts to muddle slightly towards the end of the film. Totally fine. All to say, though. I think visually the movie holds up really well. And my hot take is that I actually think this is David O. Russell's best movie. And I know a lot of people would disagree because of the run he went on much later in his career, 10 to 15 years later with, you know, The Fighter and Silver Speaker 4 (3:33) Linings Playbook and Silver Linings Playbook Speaker 2 (3:35) and American Hustle. And my takeaway is I think American Hustle is really good. I'm not as high on The Fighter or Silver Linings Playbook as other people are. I Speaker 4 (3:42) agree with you. I could get behind this being his best movie 100%. And I really like his movies. Speaker 2 (3:47) Yeah. Generally speaking, I wasn't a huge fan of Joy or Amsterdam, although I think those are... I think actually, like, if you were to put them in a different director's filmography, we would perhaps look at them slightly differently. I think in part, like, it felt like a bit of a downturn from, again, the Oscar Beatty stuff he'd done prior. But all to say, I really enjoyed rewatching this movie. I do think it's still it's one of the best movies to explore the intersections of the export of American consumerism into, you know, the Middle East and then the, you know, import of oil. It's all these kind of conflicting interests that we had at the time. I love the interrogation scene that is done. by Sayid Taghmawi, the French actor from Lehane. Speaker 4 (4:24) Yeah, French Moroccan. He's amazing. Speaker 2 (4:26) Dude, broski, my main man. The way he uses the American colloquialisms in interrogating Mark Wahlberg, I think is brilliant. And so, yeah, I really like this movie. I think it's really good. I Speaker 4 (4:38) agree with you 100%. Very similar experience. I actually don't even know if I had ever seen this all the way through. I think there was a period where this was running on like TNT or TBS somewhat frequently, not Shawshank Redemption level, but I know I had seen bits and pieces of it because there are certain scenes from this, certain visuals that I remembered very clearly, but I don't think I'd ever sat down and watched the whole thing. And I just loved it. I thought beginning to end, this movie is excellent. The pacing is great. I agree with you that it starts to fall apart a little bit as they kind of are grappling with, you know, whether or not they're doing the right thing and how to do the right thing. But I still think the whole thing works incredibly well. I love Spike Jonze in this movie. He's so good. He's so Speaker 2 (5:20) good. When Spike Jonze is driving the luxury vehicle up toward the bunker and Chicago is playing on... The speaker is one of the most, that's the absurd tone I liked most in this movie was that like a moment like that, for example. Yes. It's so good. I Speaker 4 (5:35) agree. I think that that tone, the way that they were able to achieve this weird liminal space across this whole movie, I think is done so exceptionally well. And of course, we cannot leave out that quite a bit of that is due to, I think our favorite production designer, Catherine Hardwick, back again on this. She's really good at this. She's really good at, you know. building these almost otherworldly spaces that still feel very real and grounded, like just the painting of Saddam in the cave with the graduation cap on and the one Speaker 2 (6:07) where he's kissing the little kid. There's so many kind of disturbing ones. Speaker 4 (6:12) Yeah, it's so strange. You know, we'll talk about this a bit in the episode, but they really did. Both David O. Russell, to his credit, and also people like Catherine Hardwick, below the line crew members, really went above and beyond in terms of speaking to a lot of Iraqi refugees and trying to get this to feel as true to life as they possibly could without, of course, being able to visit the region themselves. And I think that that comes across very clearly. I think this might be Mark Wahlberg's best performance. Speaker 2 (6:40) It's one of my favorites because I think they play well into... He's not quite a tough guy. That's right. Even though he is kind of a tough... He's like a good guy, but he's not quite a tough guy. He's not really a hero. No, he's Speaker 4 (6:52) a little dumb. He's Speaker 2 (6:53) a little dumb, but he's smarter than Spike Jonze by a country mile. But I Speaker 4 (6:56) mean, who's not? Speaker 2 (6:58) Yes, it feels self-aware. I may still put The Departed above it technically because it's so ridiculous. But yeah, it's Speaker 4 (7:06) a Speaker 2 (7:06) great Wahlberg role. He's Speaker 4 (7:07) very fun in The Departed. Or Speaker 2 (7:09) Boogie Nights. Speaker 4 (7:09) Yes, that's true. Boogie Nights, he's wonderful. The Departed, he's so much fun. But there's something about this. Maybe it's because he had the confidence from having done Boogie Nights that he still was not a bona fide movie star when he made this movie that I feel like he let himself be more vulnerable in this than I really see him be in other performances. And it's just a reminder that he is a good actor. Yeah, Speaker 2 (7:33) he's very guileless in this movie. He Speaker 4 (7:34) is, yeah. It doesn't feel like watching Mark Wahlberg. It feels like actually watching a character. And, you know, I understand he is also a problematic person, but we're going to deal with another problematic person over the course of this episode. So join the club. Speaker 2 (7:47) Did you were going to shout out the Arrested Development, pre-Arrested Development reunion prequel? Judy Greer and who? Please tell me you recognize Amir's daughter, Cliff Curtis's daughter in this movie. No. That's all he's shocked at. That's maybe. Really? Yeah. Oh, my God. No, Speaker 4 (8:02) I did not realize that. Oh, wow. OK, well, there you go. It's Kitty and maybe. That's right. Judy Greer, always fun. Also, we're watching the five-star weekend in which she has a bit of a villain turn, which is fun for her. And then obviously Ice Cube, who is just like... He's really good in this movie. Ice Speaker 2 (8:19) Cube is Speaker 4 (8:19) such a good actor. And that, I mean, should go without saying at this point, given the work that he's done, but he really... We Speaker 2 (8:25) should also mention George Clooney. Oh, we're Speaker 4 (8:27) going to get to George Clooney. I Speaker 2 (8:28) love a slightly dirtbag George Clooney. Yes. Who's deep down a good guy. I like that. I was thinking of... Out of Sight, the Soderbergh movie he did with Jennifer Lopez around this time. He's so good in these types of movies. Speaker 4 (8:40) Yes, he is. He is. That movie actually, as we're going to learn, played a big part in him getting Three Kings. Oh, Speaker 2 (8:45) cool. Speaker 4 (8:45) Yeah, I was saving George Clooney because George Clooney's performance in this is one of his best. I understand it, as we will learn, was quite a miserable experience for him. But he does such a good job. He is so understated and just compassionate and emotional and doesn't overplay his hand. at any point over the course of this movie and was maybe a bit of a hero in real life as well. So let's get into all of it. All right. Three Kings was released in 1999. It was written and directed by David O. Russell with a story by John Ridley. Let's not forget that. It stars George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube, Spike Jonze, Nora Dunn, by the way, a drop dead gorgeous repeat back here. Judy Greer, Michael T. Williamson, always good. Cliff Curtis, Jamie Kennedy, Saeed Taghmawi, and many, many more. Also, Jamie Kennedy, I think, is very funny in this. I know he's doing his shtick, but he's good at it. And the IMDb logline is, as always, in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War, four soldiers set out to steal gold that was stolen from Kuwait, but they discover people who desperately need their help. Sure. Speaker 2 (9:49) Yeah. That's basically it. Speaker 4 (9:50) Our main sources for today are a piece that was published in Slate, written by Brian Rafferty, but it's from the book Best Movie Year Ever, How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen, and that is called Desert Storm, How Three Kings Almost Fell Apart, a creative screenwriting interview with David O. Russell, Entertainment Weekly's coverage, and then, of course, Rebels on the Backlot by Sharon Waxman, and many, many more. All right, let's start with a little bit of context on the Gulf War, and more specifically, Operation Desert Storm, because I'll be honest, This was happening essentially when we were like one year old. And I have an enormous gap, I think, in an understanding of this period of history, maybe because we were so young that we were aware it had happened, but it wasn't really being taught in schools. I don't know about you, but I felt like that for myself. So the Iran-Iraq War lasted from September of 1980 to August of 1988. Basically what happened here, Saddam Hussein had decided to take advantage of the chaos that erupted following the Islamic revolution in Iran in around 1979. So he invades Iran, tries to gain control of the Shat al-Arab waterway, and also the oil-rich area along the border between the two countries. It doesn't go great for anybody. The war ended with a UN ceasefire. But the damage that had been done had absolutely devastated Iraq, both in terms of human casualties and also the actual money that they had spent on the war, because they had to borrow an enormous amount of cash from countries like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and yes, the U.S. and Soviet Union in order to keep fighting. This is why when, you know, Saeed Taghmawi as the interrogator is saying, I was trained by U.S. soldiers, that is true. So with the war over, Kuwait obviously wanted their money back. And instead, Iraq basically said, no, you're exceeding your oil production quotas. You're producing too much. You're selling it too cheaply. You're undercutting Iraq's Speaker 2 (11:37) oil revenue. And Speaker 4 (11:39) also Saddam Hussein Speaker 2 (11:40) was like, Speaker 4 (11:40) surprise, you're also an Iraqi territory. And Kuwait was like, what? Wait, no, what? We lent you money. And so he then sent 30,000 troops to the border to kind of hover threateningly. And this is in 1990-ish. And in July of 1990, Kuwait said, okay, fine, we will limit our oil production, you know, leave us alone. Saddam said, that's great. We'd also like to accuse you of drinking our milkshake, aka stealing oil through cross-border slant drilling. So they demanded Kuwait pay them $10 billion. Kuwait said, how about $500 million? And then Iraq invaded Kuwait. So within two days, Iraq had installed a puppet government. Just a few days after that, Hussein announced that Kuwait was a province of Iraq. The UN denounces the invasion. They tell Iraq to get out of there. Iraq refused. So this is when a Kuwaiti resistance movement formed, to which the Iraqi military responded by very brutally torturing and murdering people who resisted, most of whom were civilians. By November of 1990, the UN authorized the use of all necessary means against Hussein if he did not stop the war on Kuwait. And of course, U.S. President George H.W. Bush was getting increasingly anxious that Hussein may eventually move on Saudi Arabia, which would obviously be bad for business. So he got permission to increase our troops' presence in Saudi Arabia. He gets Congress's permission to intervene in the war on Kuwait. Saddam Hussein just keeps on keeping on. He ignores everybody. And so this is when a coalition led mostly by the U.S. began actually bombing Iraqi forces from the air. That is Operation Desert Storm. Meanwhile, over about half a million U.S. soldiers poured into the Persian Gulf region, of course, along with soldiers from at least 28 other countries. And they were discovering that airstrikes weren't quite enough. So on February 24th of 1991, the coalition enters Kuwait. They are able to overwhelm and basically destroy the Iraqi forces quite quickly. I believe it's within like... four days, I think, a ceasefire took place. Speaker 2 (13:39) I think the bombing run ran, I want to say, like the last four months of 1990. And then, you know, the beginning of 91. And then, yeah, the boots on the ground was basically a week. Speaker 4 (13:50) It's nothing. It's not even. It's like half a week. Yeah. Which Speaker 2 (13:53) is in part what led to, obviously, the false sense of confidence with our second incursion into the Gulf and the whole mission accomplished faux pas and whatnot that would haunt Bush's son. Yes, Speaker 4 (14:03) exactly. And on their way out, the remaining Iraqi troops, and you see this in the movie, they burned at least 700 oil wells. And some of those kept burning for 10 months, which caused unbelievable pollution in Kuwait and also cost Kuwait upwards of $1.5 billion. Now, as you can probably tell from that very short and oversimplified retelling of the war, things in the region were an absolute hot mess after this. And in the midst of all of that residual chaos, it became clear that millions of dollars of Kuwaiti gold and valuables had gone missing. And of course, they were being hidden by Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Now, one soon-to-be TV writer on shows like Martin and the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was pretty interested in this story about how the Middle East got flip-turned upside down. And for a few years, he kept mulling over an idea for a movie. This is, of course, John Ridley. He would become a celebrated novelist as well as eventually Academy Award-winning screenwriter for 12 Years a Slave. But by the mid-90s, he had become a staff TV writer who, in his spare time, decided to write a script about American soldiers in Iraq hunting for gold. He said, I wanted to see how fast I could write and sell a screenplay. So I came up with the most commercial and visually interesting story I could think of. He pulled inspiration from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, something that comes up often on this podcast. And in just one week, Chris. He had written a screenplay called The Spoils of War, and he sold it to Warner Brothers less than a month later. Yeah. And just to double down again, this was not, you know, pulled out of nowhere. As we've said, there were millions of dollars worth of gold and valuables that had been looted by Saddam's forces. It was also a lingering point of contention, even at this point, I think, because in addition to the gold, Hussein had absconded with valuable artifacts that Kuwait wanted back. I believe they did eventually get the gold back, but I don't know if they got everything. So one day, a young indie director hot off his second feature film came across the logline for The Spoils of War in Warner Brothers' logbook of purchased but unproduced scripts that they had just been sitting on. And this director immediately knew that this would be his next movie. So let's talk about David, oh boy, Russell. He was born in 1958 in an affluent suburb of New York. Both of his parents worked at Simon & Schuster, his father as VP of sales and his mother as a secretary. Simon & Schuster, of course, is a publishing company. His father, whose original name was Markovsky and changed it to Russell, traveled a lot and according to rebels in the back lot was known to be both physically and emotionally distant. His mother, on the other hand, may have been better if she was a little distant. According to the same book, she was an alcoholic who pushed David very, very hard to succeed. And this evidently included both emotional and at times physical abuse. At 13 years old, he made his first film for a school project, but he didn't ever really think he wanted to be a filmmaker because both of his parents had worked in the literary world, so he always dreamed of being a writer. And in 1981, he graduated from Amherst with degrees in English and political science. He then traveled to Nicaragua and taught in a Sandinista literacy program, which evidently left him pissed off at both President Ronald Reagan and the leftist Sandinistas. Speaker 2 (17:00) They were a Nicaraguan political organization. They'd overthrown the Somoza dictatorship in 1979, Speaker 4 (17:05) which I think actually came up in our Out of Frame episode on the Cotton Club murder. So they had launched a campaign to increase literacy in the country. But can you imagine having David O. Russell as your English teacher? Speaker 2 (17:16) No. No, Speaker 4 (17:17) especially if English is not your first language. Yikes. Feeling disillusioned with basically everything. He returned to the U.S. and took up a series of odd jobs, including waitering, catering, bartending, sometimes at the homes of uber-richies like Rupert Murdoch and Jackie O. And one fun fact, Chris, some of the guys he worked with during this time were the founders of the Blue Man Group. Chris Wink, Phil Stanton, and Matt Goldman. Speaker 2 (17:39) Very odd. Yes. One of my film school classmates, who's the director now, was an actor for a long time, and he was a touring member of one iteration of the Blue Man Group, I believe. Blue Man Group's pretty cool. Yeah. Speaker 4 (17:51) He then turned to community organizing in some of the rougher neighborhoods of Boston, but found himself burned out pretty quickly. Not a surprise there. I can't imagine the rougher parts of Boston being welcoming. Walking into my neighborhood? Yeah. What are you organizing? And finally, he realized the only thing that seemed to still give him joy was movies. So he thought, fuck it. I'm going to try and make them. But he didn't know how. He did not go to film school. He just watched movies over and over and over, and he was particularly inspired by the morally murky American films, in quotes, of the 70s like Chinatown and Dog Day Afternoon. So he kicked off his own directing career with a documentary short. In 1985, he directed a short which followed the daily lives of Panamanian immigrant workers in Boston. And around this same time, he also lands his first real gig as a PA on the PBS series Smithsonian World. Then between 87 and 1990, he got a couple of shorts screened at the Sundance Film Festival, which Chris has also done, and David. He also worked there as a ticket taker. So just remember, you never know who's taking your tickets. Be nice to your ticket takers. This was all happening, of course, as Operation Desert Storm was kicking into full swing. David O. Russell said, quote, I remember I was at Sundance when the war started, and to me, it was better than any of the movies that were there. It was just this weird thing that was going on. It made you nauseous and excited at the same time. So next, he raised about $80,000 in private funding, and he also got some grants. And this was for a feature that he had pitched as being about a fortune cookie writer. But Speaker 2 (19:19) then... Speaker 4 (19:20) He decided, ah, I'm going to make a comedy about an incestuous mother-son relationship instead. And this became... Have you ever seen Spanking the Monkey? I have not seen Spanking the Monkey. It's Speaker 2 (19:30) good. It's funny. Yeah. It's super weird. It almost, at the time, I saw it later, obviously. But Speaker 4 (19:36) you could see a different Speaker 2 (19:37) world where he goes in a more Todd Salon's direction, potentially. That makes sense. But Speaker 4 (19:41) yeah. You just tell Speaker 2 (19:42) us what it's about, Lizzie. Speaker 4 (19:43) It's about an incestuous mother-son relationship. Speaker 2 (19:46) But the whole movie is a will-they-won't-they sort of tension building between Jeremy Davies and his mother. Yes. He's the caretaker of her as well. It's very, very strange. Yes. Speaker 4 (19:55) Naturally, he did have to go ahead and hand that money back that he'd gotten from the private funding and grants. But it didn't matter because this won the audience award at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival. It also helped that back in 92, he had married New Line executive Janet Grillo, who had helped him get distribution after the film's success at Sundance. Spanking the Monkees' indie success led to a deal with... what company that snapped up indie filmmakers and made them bigger? Speaker 2 (20:22) Miramax. Speaker 4 (20:24) Miramax, which led to the Ben Stiller indie film Flirting with Disaster in 1996. And that loops us back around to where we are in our story. So David O. Russell is a hot new indie filmmaker. Naturally, that means that two Warner Brothers co-presidents of production, Bill Gerber and Lorenzo de Bonaventura, said, come on over to us and make your next film with us. Now, Russell was very surprised. He said, because I always thought of Warner Brothers as being the least independent of the studios. In fact, I think they were one of the only major studios that didn't have an indie division at this time. Bill Gerber would end up leaving Warner Brothers before Three Kings got off the ground, but de Bonaventura was in it for the long haul with Russell. Speaker 2 (21:06) If you're like me, you hate paying rent. And if you're not like me, you're weird. So you should be more like me, hate paying rent, and get something back for it. 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