Three Kings

(Warner)

David O. Russell's Gulf War story of four American soldiers -- George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Spike Jonze, and Ice Cube -- who find a map directing them to Kuwaiti gold hidden in an Iranian bunker could easily have been a straightforward genre exercise. But Russell launches a layered, witty, enlightening assault on conventions and preconceptions. The adventurers find not only gold but a stockpile of consumerism gone mad -- VCRs, coffeemakers, designer jeans, CD players and TVs -- plus scores of civilians imprisoned for rising up against Saddam Hussein and doomed to torture and death. Russell's images reveal a lot about the long-ago media event known as the Gulf War, and more about the gulf in sensibility that has followed.