Three Kings - Starring George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Cliff Curtis, Ice Cube - Movies

Perhaps because it was The Television War - it lasted all of a mini-series run, rated well and made a star of CNN - the Gulf conflict hasn't really translated to the big screen.

True, Courage Under Fire did its earnest best, assuming everybody involved had, like, issues to work through afterwards.

And South Park: Bigger Longer and Uncut wouldn't have been quite the same minus Saddam ....

But no, Operation Desert Storm hasn't been exactly inspiring in the near decade of its aftermath. Admittedly, we may have missed the Iraqi cinematic response.

But now comes Three Kings, which not only turns the idea of a war movie about the events of 1991 on its head, it delivers a telling condemnation of the smokescreen which came with the "victory" and has a scathingly funny, perilously exciting time doing it.

It shouldn't work as well it does.

It is, after all, an old-fashioned tale with some stylistic mod cons.

When the characters played by Clooney, Wahlberg, Cube and co head into the desert at the war's end, on a mission to relieve Saddam of some of his plundered gold bullion, it could be an update of one of those south-of-the-border westerns from Sam Peckinpah's days - one where the motley crew go steal General Pajero's treasure, only to get caught in a peasant revolt and forced to take sides. But this time the cavalry are in camo gear, drive humvees and like their hip-hop.

And just as Peckinpah had a thing for hails of bullets, here director Russell has a thing for what one stray shell does to the human body. That's demonstrated in cutaway anatomical detail complete with explanation by Clooney's soul-weary Major Gates. Here, almost every bullet means something. And despite the occasional explosive thrills and spills, it's almost like an anti-action movie. It's certainly an anti-war one. When a tanker truck overturns during a firefight you brace yourself for the explosion - turns out it's full of milk which drenches everyone in non-pasteurised humiliation.

While turning action cliches into black comedy punchlines, Russell also fiddles with drastic shifts of mood and saturated colour tones, adding a surreal edge and crackling energy.

Those visuals mirror the askew territory the American soldiers head into inside Iraq, where, because they're on unofficial business and their enemy has already surrendered, they can't interfere with the military repression of the locals who've heeded George Bush's call to rise up against their dictator only to find they don't have the backup of their supposed liberators.

So a crisis of conscience develops among our band of happy-go-lucky pirates. They must turn their heist into a rescue mission of sorts after they find themselves rescued by anti-Saddam Iraqis led by (hooray!) our own Cliff Curtis in the first of his two Arab roles in major American films this year. Darn good he is, too, and as long as American-Middle East enmity lasts, he'll have plenty of work.

It can get heavy-handed at times. In the scenes where Wahlberg's average grunt is being tortured by Iraqi captors (with methods taught to them by the Americans back when Iran was the enemy) he is literally forced to swallow the real reason for the war - crude oil. Also a subplot involving a hapless television reporter designed to skewer the military spin on the media's reporting of the war doesn't quite have as sharp a point as the rest of its barbed wit. But Three Kings is a great war film about a not-so-great war. If you were among those television-ratings points at the time, you owe it to yourself to see it.

n.e.w@journalist.com

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Page Updated Sun Mar 26, 2000 5:03am EST