Three Kings

Mark Wahlberg (Actor), Ice Cube (Actor), David O. Russell (Director)

Three Kings is a really interesting take on the 1991 Gulf War. The movie begins just as the war is over. Major Archie Gates (George Clooney) finds out about a stash of gold Saddam Hussein took from Kuwait and decides he’s going steal it. He recruits Sergeant Barlow (Mark Wahlberg),

Sergeant Elgin (Ice Cube), and Private Vig (Spike Jonze) to help him. What starts as a heist flick then turns into a story of liberation as the soldiers come across a group of Iraqis fleeing Saddam who was putting down the uprising that started in southern Iraq when the war ended. That puts the question to Gates and the company are they going to take the gold or are they going to try to save the Iraqis?  Major Gates and his soldiers immediately find themselves in a dilemma.

 They arrive in a town and find the civilians begging them for help while the soldiers are trying to control them. Gates explains that President Bush called on the Iraqis to rise up and overthrow Saddam and now his army was wiping them out. Hence a tanker arrives full of milk and a soldier blows it up with a rocket to try to starve the people. 

 They got to the next town and find a bunch of civilians being held with one being tortured by the Iraqi army because they’re accused of being rebels. The Iraqi army tells Gates he can have the gold but all the civilian prisoners have to stay. One woman pleads with them in English “Don’t leave” until a soldier shoots her in the head. Will Gates and the company be driven by greed or will they become humanitarians when they see the suffering of the common Iraqis?  The Iraqis aren’t just victims or oppressors either. You get to hear some of them explain their situations.

 One rebel leader talks about the hypocrisy of the United States that came to save the Kuwaitis but didn’t care about the Iraqis. An Iraqi soldier tells Sergeant Barlow about how an American bombing raid killed his family.  This is what really makes The Three Kings as it shows the aftermath of the Gulf War in a very engaging way