Three Kings [Blu-ray]

Oh! Those Extras! And how's the film? Fine.
THREE KINGS is not for everyone. And it's not easily pigeonholed. Fans of categorization will hate it. :)

"What's it like?" they ask. You can't say it's a comedy, because plenty of people won't find it funny. Can you say it's a heist film? Only if you're narrow-minded. An action movie? Yeah, maybe, but this isn't comic book action here.

Soldiers at the tail end of the Gulf War get a lead on a hidden stash of gold and decide to find it and take it home. What happens to them along the way changes their objectives and changes their lives in profound ways. Director David O Russell has crafted a movie that SEEMS to be aimless, changing directions with the wind, but is actually a movie with a certain destination, taking a more realistic approach to arrive there. A good example of this narrative philosophy is pointed out by Russell in his excellent and illuminating commentary track: in one scene Clooney is rushing pell-mell through an underground bunker and collides...

An extraordinary piece of work
I was expecting a fun in the sun with guns and gold kind of movie. Boy was I surprised! This ranks up with movies like Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line as a really intelligent "war like it really is" story.

It starts off fairly simply. At the end of Desert Storm a group of soldiers find a map showing where stolen Kuwaiti gold was being kept so they go get it. What was extraordinary was the way that the Iraqi soldiers actually helped them but would not let them help any of the locals. Orders from Saddam they said.

However, seeing the injustice being meted out by the Iraqi soldiers our four heroes (Clooney, Wahlberg, Cube and Jonze) decide to intervene. Things do not go well as Wahlberg is captured and tortured and all their vehicles are destroyed.

The torture scene is poignant. Wahlberg and his torturer have much in common: they are fathers, they joined the army to give their families a better standard of living, except that the torturer's one year...

to heck with the politics
I'll admit the first time I saw this movie in the cinema; I didn't like it that much. Then again, I wasn't sure what to expect. I wasn't sure whether it would be a comedy, a drama, or an action film etc. So when the movie was finished and I was walking out of the cinema, I wasn't too sure what to make of it.
I didn't watch the movie for another few years until my friend got it on DVD and having nothing else to do, I decided to watch it again, hoping I would have a different point of view after watching it for a second time. And boy, am I glad I did!
Three Kings is a great movie with; I believe, a deeper meaning. The basic plot is about 4 soldiers in the Gulf War who discover a map on a prisoner after the war is over. It turns out that the map shows the location of $23 million worth of Kuwaiti bullion stolen by the Iraqis. So these 4 soldiers set about getting themselves a nice little bonus. However, upon retrieving the gold, Sgt. Archie Gates (Clooney) and his men are faced...

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