“Are we shooting? Are we still shooting people or what?”

That’s the opening line to David O Russell’s Three Kings and a thesis statement, too. It’s March 1991 and the Gulf war has just ended, but Sergeant Troy Barlow (Mark Wahlberg) doesn’t know whether the armed Iraqi soldier he’s spied in his scope is a target or not. And the yokels behind him are no help, either: one of them has a grain of sand stuck in his eye. After Barlow takes the shot, the first action any of them have seen in the war, he and his men hover over the twitching body in a scene that recalls the felled sniper at the end of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. In both instances, a piece of their humanity is lost, and in both instances not one of them could tell you why.
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It’s been 20 years since Three Kings, Russell’s confident foray into studio film-making after the indie comedies Spanking the Monkey and Flirting with Disaster, stormed into theaters. Since that time, there’s been a bigger, splashier sequel to the Gulf war and a war in Afghanistan, but the rationale for both isn’t much better than the urgent need to “liberate” a Middle Eastern country that most people couldn’t locate on a map. Both of those wars were premised on a terrorist threat, an answer to an attack that happened almost exactly two years after Three Kings came out, but some of young men and women eligible to enlist in 2019 were only infants on 9/11. Their rationale for being there indefinitely has become as obscure as the path to victory. No doubt some of them are out there now, seeing how night-vision goggles work during the day.

Three Kings uncannily anticipated the mission drift, the refugee crises and the forever wars that have plagued the United States since it came out, but eight years after Operation Desert Storm ended, Russell just wanted audiences to know what the hell it was all about. Working from a story by John Ridley – a whole screenplay, really, which led to an ugly attribution dispute – Russell uses a thrilling update on The Treasure of the Sierra Madre to smuggle in a sophisticated treatment of the chaos and tragedy that filled the vacuum left by the US at the end of the war. Russell is pulling off two jobs at once here: just as his marauders use the postwar chaos to smuggle $23m in gold bullion (“No, not the little cubes you put in hot water to make soup”), his film uses an action-packed heist comedy to smuggle a damning assessment of American foreign policy.
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