Three Kings

Starring: George Clooney, Ice Cube, Mark Wahlberg, Spike Jonze

Russell brilliantly reinvents the war movie in a picture that is the hippest (and I mean that in a good way), coolest thing around. Loud, brash, profane, and outlandish, "Three Kings" takes the conventions of the genre and puts an end-of-the-millennium spin on them. Since it is not really about war, but about some very strange goings on during a war (in this case the gulf War), it is the perfect coda to the surreal Desert Storm video-war we all experienced on CNN. I can't think of another film that so effectively points up the sheer insanity of the war zone since... well... since "Apocalypse Now," and Russell shares some of the same subversive bent that Coppola displayed in that earlier film. The Gulf War itself is almost an afterthought in the picture (in fact, if memory serves, the war actually ends during the time frame the movie depicts), so we focus on the increasingly ambiguous situations the characters must confront. Granted, they start out as thieves (though they intend to steal from the bad guy--Saddam), but by the end they have been transformed (in spite of themselves) into heroes. That we buy into this insanity is a credit to Russell's storytelling skill.

A lot has been made of the outrageous special effects (i.e. a bullet is followed as it tracks into a body), but they seem utterly in keeping with the tone of the picture. The picture is absolutely riveting from start to finish; Russell can hook you with the quiet scenes as well as the explosive ones (the sequence where Wahlberg is tortured by a soft-spoken Libyan is keeps us squirming, but it's soon followed by a darkly hilarious scene of Wahlberg making one of the more unusual cell phone calls in history.). Wahlberg and Ice Cube are perfectly cast, and Clooney shows the same star power that he did in "Out of Sight," only on a bigger canvas. I really disliked Russell's "Spanking the Monkey," and I was lukewarm towards "Flirting With Disaster" (I thought it ended when the story was only half over), but here he has come into his own with a truly original effort. I'm looking forward to his next one.