1. “Three Kings” (1999)
David O. Russell’s big studio debut might have disappointed at the box office, tanked with awards voters and permanently ruptured his relationship with George Clooney (the two famously came to blows on set, Clooney reportedly headbutting Russell over the treatment of an extra), but “Three Kings” now stands as the director’s most perfect picture, one of the very best films of one of the best years in American cinema history. Working from, and heavily rewriting, a script by future “12 Years A Slave” writer John Ridley, “Three Kings” promised on paper to be a sort of gung-ho action movie, a riff on “Kelly’s Heroes” set during the then-distant Gulf War. It does work as an action movie — the action sequences, particularly the big final shoot out, do what they do as well as you could possibly hope. But it also does so much more besides. Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube and, in a surprising, surprisingly effective piece of casting, fellow director and pal Spike Jonze, play four soldiers who go A.W.O.L. in search of Saddam Hussein’s gold (via a map found in a man’s ass) as the Gulf War comes to an end, only to end up in a humanitarian showdown with the Republican Guard. Russell uses the action movie treasure hunt framework for one of the most sharply funny anti-war movies since “M*A*S*H,” and one not happy to simply rest on platitudes, but instead that skewers American foreign policy, embodied through our brash anti-heroes, while retaining a humanism and compassion for everyone involved. Few of the actors have done better work than they do here before or since, and there’s some lovely work in the supporting cast too from Nora Dunn, Cliff Curtis and in particular Saïd Taghmaoui as Wahlberg’s Iraqi interrogator, a man he shares more than a little in common with. Fuck, even Jamie Kennedy’s good here. And, though the film’s startling different stylistically to anything that Russell’s made since, this feels like his coming-of-age as a filmmaker. The characteristic looseness carries over and steers this away from the formulaic traps that would have been so easy to fall into, but with a formal playfulness (thanks in large part to cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel, doing career-best work) that suggested he was becoming a real master of the craft.
Russell kicked off his career with a pair of shorts, “Bingo Inferno: A Parody On American Obsessions,” and “Hairway to The Stars.” In 2004, he also released 35-minute documentary “Soldiers Pay,” co-directed with Tricia Regan and Juan Carlos Zaldivar, intended for a DVD re-issue of “Three Kings.” Warner Bros abandoned it, due to potential controversies, but it did eventually see the light of day, and it’s strong work that suggests that Russell should think about returning to the non-fiction world more often. – Oliver Lyttelton, Nicholas Laskin
