My Favorite Scene: Three Kings

I have a few movie pet peeves, but to the best of my knowledge, nothing irritates me more than the overuse of effects. I don’t mean CGI (although that, to me, is often used in excess more often than it’s not) but rather, the use of cinematic editing effects that one can add to a film in post-production. Stop motion, time lapse, white fade, stylized sound, over saturated colors – these all (often times) leave the stamp of an amateur filmmaker, and rarely can I support it.

Which is what makes one scene in David O. Russell’s perfect Three Kings such an enigma. The scene in question uses all of those effects (and more) a few times in the span of a few minutes, yet everything – every heightened frequency, every overblown tone – everything works perfectly to dramatize a moment of horror.

Let’s dive in.

Once Major Archie Gates (George Clooney), Troy Barlow (Mark Wahlberg), Chief Elgin (Ice Cube), and Conrad Vig (Spike Jonze) have successfully stolen a shitload of gold from Saddam Hussein (directly in front of Hussein’s troops, no less), they load the bullion onto a large truck and are more or less home free. Then Gates’ conscience gets the better of him.

He looks around and, finally, takes in the harsh treatment that Hussein’s soldiers are inflicting on the Iraqi uprisers. And directly after an innocent, unarmed woman pleading for the Americans to help is shot dead (watch Clooney’s perfect reaction to this, slowly resting his head on the steering wheel), Three Kings turns from a farcical post-war comedy, to a dead serious war drama that demands to be reckoned with.

Gates steps out from his Humvee and the Iraqi soldier in charge kindly tells him to leave, in which Gates confidently responds, “I don’t think so.” Clooney’s excellent line delivery is followed by two others, in which Wahlberg asserts his opposition to staying, and Cube gently (but forcefully) demands to help.

Gates asks his men to cover him, which they do (some hesitantly, others insistently). Gates slowly approaches the assassin, and swiftly disarms him as cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel bum rushes Clooney and gracefully pans around him. Gates walks back to the leader and tells him he wants the soldiers to leave the town and its people in peace. The Iraqi leader denies and attempts to bring his assault rifle to Gates’ head. “No shooting,” Gates calmly states. The Iraqi accidently shoots himself in the leg, and what follows is a shoot out unlike anything I’ve ever seen.

And here is where the seemingly overuse of effects comes into play. When an Iraqi soldier fires a shot at Gates, we hear the shot while the camera is focused on the soldier  then quickly, hazily pan to Clooney, zoom in, and hear him get hit. Wahlberg fires back, the camera zooms, the bullet whizzes, and the soldier is hit. This happens a few more times before Gates brings the assault rifle to the leader’s head and blows his brains out, blood quickly spouting all over Gate’s bewildered face. The leader falls dead, and we cut to a shot of Clooney from below, as the bright white clouds time lapse in fast motion above him.

Captive Iraqis stare dumbfounded (if not hopeful), we cut to a sky-lapsing shot of Cube, Wahlberg retrieves the bullet on his chest caught by his bullet proof vest, and everyone looks at everyone thinking the exact same thing: What in the fuck do we do now?

Now, after that moment, the movie stylistically gets back to the “normal” it has set for itself from the beginning (over exposed whites, harsh blues, grainy print, etc.), but for those few minutes, we are privy to so many artificialities that should, by any logical sense, have the exact opposite effect that they do. The slow-to-fast motion, the blurry camera pans, the delayed sound, the gritty texture – none of it should work, but somehow David O. Russell and his cast and crew make the sequence sing.

Three Kings is filled with nifty tricks like these. And although a shot of a bullet slowly puncturing what appears to be an actual human lung gets far more acknowledgement, it is this scene in particular that helps best distinguish Three Kings from, what? Other war films? Certainly. Other films period? Most definitely.

Previous installments of My Favorite Scene include:

8 Mile
Babel
Brokeback Mountain
Crash
Deliverance
Fargo
The Godfather
The Godfather Part II
GoodFellas
He Got Game
House of Games
Hustle & Flow
Inception
Insomnia
Leaving Las Vegas
Philadelphia
Platoon
Raging Bull
Redbelt
The Rules of Attraction
Se7en
The Silence of Taratino
Sleepers
The Films of Tony Scott

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