Three Kings

One of the most original and least heralded of young, independent filmmakers, David O. Russell might finally have drawn a winning hand with Three Kings. From the absurdist dynamics of suicide and masturbation in Spanking the Monkey and the anarchic consequences of an Oedipal search for the truth in Flirting with Disaster, he's raised his sights to less introspective topics -- greed, chaos, and responsibility. He's also upped the ante stylistically. Three Kings could easily have been a straightforward genre exercise with an exotic and controversial setting. Instead it is a layered, witty, enlightening assault on conventions and preconceptions, a crackling palimpsest that challenges as it entertains.

Eight years later, does anyone really know who won the Gulf War or why it was fought? President Bush (the elder) is long gone, Saddam Hussein seems there to stay, the Iraqis are still miserable, and Americans have channel-surfed their way through nearly a decade of other scandals and atrocities. Perhaps the war's greatest legacy is the detachment it promoted -- those looking for a scapegoat for current outbreaks of mindless violence might start with the nightly images of smart-bombing with which the Defense Department seduced America.

The violence that opens Three Kings is a lot more ambiguous. The initial image is of endless, flattened desert, with the sound of footsteps and labored breathing. Far away, a man on a mound holds a white flag in one hand, an AK-47 in the other. "Are we shooting?" a voice shouts off screen. Indeed they are. One round from an M-16 later and the bedraggled squad of Americans behold their first Iraqi, coughing blood and still very human.

The marksman is Army sergeant Troy Barlow (Mark Wahlberg, demonstrating he did not shoot his thespian wad in Boogie Nights), and along with the other principal characters he's introduced with a wise-ass subtitle in the film's mostly wise-ass opening. A cease-fire has been declared, they're still alive, and dancing and drinking off-limits hootch with Barlow are redneck naïf private Conrad Vig (Spike Jonze as a '90s version of Don Knotts) and born-again-Christian-but-still-street-smart sergeant Chief Elgin (Ice Cube, cool and solid as usual). Pursuing his own brand of R&R is Special Forces captain Archie Gates (George Clooney, triumphantly following up his breakthrough role in Out of Sight), who's debriefing a nubile network correspondent in an uncomfortable-looking compromising position.

The next morning, though, they confront hangovers and the fog of peace. Barlow, Vig, and Elgin, stuck strip-searching some of the thousands of Iraqi POWs, come across a map secreted in an officer's butt. Word gets back to the war-weary Vietnam vet Gates, and in no time the four are careering through the desert to an Iraqi bunker behind enemy lines.

Up to this point, Russell's style has been more insouciant than insightful, kind of a soundbite version of M*A*S*H without much of Robert Altman's vitriol or irony, but distinctive in its jagged, jump-cut parallel editing and an etiolated cinematography with a texture like the dust-covered, gray-blotched camouflaged khakis of the troops. Once the adventurers penetrate into the depths of the Iraqi bunker, however, the film deepens as well. Within is a stockpile of consumerism gone mad -- piles of VCRs, coffeemakers, and designer jeans, racks of CD players and TVs spewing pop music and media images ranging from Rodney King to news footage from the war they just participated in. The gold turns up too, but so do scores of civilians imprisoned for rising up against Saddam and doomed to torture and death.

The tense standoff that follows could be compared to the pre-Dance-of-Death moment in The Wild Bunch, but even with the three decades of violent imagery that have intervened since that classic movie, Russell's shootout possesses its own shock, beauty, and gravity. And the film as a whole bears similarities to many others, from Treasure of the Sierra Madre to It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World and most of all the old Clint Eastwood chestnut Kelly's Heroes. But Russell transcends derivativeness and genre with inspirations of his own. His images -- Sergeant Barlow frantically searching through piles of stolen cell phones to find one with which he can reach his wife; a strangely sympathetic Iraqi torturer interrogating a GI about Michael Jackson; dozens of Iraqis bearing Tourister luggage laden with gold trudging across the dunes -- reveal a lot about the long-ago media event known as the Gulf War, and more about the gulf in sensibility that has followed.

-- Peter Keough