It seems appropriate that the anticlimactic Gulf War, known more for CNN's establishment of hegemony over the media than any acts of human heroism, should be filmed and co-scripted by a director known for his comedies.

David O Russell, after the light Oedipal drama of Spanking the Monkey and the impeccably funny Flirting with Disaster, directs Three Kings with the acute satirical eye that made his earlier films so successful. The compassion that made Flirting with Disaster so much less cruel a comedy than, say, There's Something About Mary allows him to expound on and reveal the hypocrisy, prejudices and petty acts of violence of the American soldiers in Iraq without flattening his characters into types or making his script implausible. There are ample comedic moments: ass jokes, an exploding cow, the presence of Marky Mark (who despite his accomplished acting in this film and Boogie Nights sadly will never outlive his Calvin Klein poster-boy image), but Russell integrates his comic touch into Three Kings in a way that makes the moments of absurdity the most revealing and saves the serious plot from the humorlessness of an Oliver Stone epic.

Three Kings seems at first quite fantastical: four bored soldiers, AWOL with a hum-vee, searching for buried treasure. With the grizzled Major Archie Gates (George Clooney), a disillusioned officer leading their illicit adventure, these swashbucklers embark upon their search for hidden Kuwaiti gold led by a secret map concealed in a captured Iraqi's ass, affectionately dubbed "the ass map," with a duffell bag filled with grenade rigged nerf footballs. Denied any of the war's action, these four soldiers enthusiastically seek their last chance to blow things up, now that the war is officially over. Russell goes out of his way to emphasize that his heroes are reserve soldiers; they read like a random cross sampling of American life. Chief (Ice Cube) is described as "on a paid four-month vacation" from his job as a baggage handler at the Detroit Airport. Conrad Vig (Spike Jonze), is a boyish, impetuous redneck, and Troy Barlow (an impish Mark Wahlberg), a new father, is his best friend and role model.

The savvy Gates, who hatches the daring scheme, reassures his young compatriots that they will not encounter conflict. Saddam's forces, he explains, are too busy thwarting the insurgent rebellion among the Iraqis to bother with the minor looting of a few Americans.

On their way to the buried treasure, the magisterial Gates tells his fellow mercenaries that the most important thing in life is necessity. By calculating what the most necessary thing is to each side in a conflict, one can predict an enemy's actions. While Saddam's troops are fighting rebels among their own people, he reasons, they are not going to bother about a small band of Americans pillaging. For the Iraqis, survival is the necessity; for Saddam his survival as a dictator and tyrant, and for the Iraqi people, simply their lives. For the American soldiers, necessity is riches, comfort, luxury, and it is with sugarplum visions that they embark on their secret mission.

Gates turns out to be right. Wielding their guns, they enter the designated bunker, Gates holding the cease-fire agreement in front of him like a search warrant, repeating, "In the name of President Bush, and under the terms of the cease fire-agreement, let us through. We are here for your protection and safety." The Iraqis show no fear or hostility, and surround them with pleas for food, medicine and help. This reception is not what they expect, and this scene of the movie, shot with grainy, color-saturated ektachrome film, presents their situation as almost surreal. The walls are painted with vast smiling portraits of Saddam Hussein, hugged by loving children, wearing a tasseled hat and waving a diploma, looking benevolently down the narrow passageways of the bunkers.

In one of the most beautiful and terrifying scenes of the movie, we see a cargo truck--loaded with oil? biological weapons? noxious chemicals?--shot to pieces by over-enthusiastic Iraqi National soldiers. Milk spills out of the metal hold of the truck among the people who need it so badly.

It is thus fitting that the gold is found in a bunker whose entrance is hidden in a well. Instead of water, which is the difference between life and death in the desert, we find money, appliances and rolex watches. We find that these items, too, are important for survival; as currency value is deflated, luxury items and automobiles are traded for food.

Saddam's soldiers help the Americans load the ingots of gold (stored in the heart of a vast underground labyrinth of cuisinarts and television sets, the spoils of war, in Louis Vuitton bags) into their truck. What is the price of this uncalled for assistance? Merely that the Americans avert their eyes to scenes of torture and murder of civilian men, women, and children.

In a visceral and heart-wrenching scene, we witness the escape of a rebel leader, gagged with chicken wire and a wooden block, rush towards his screaming wife and child. He is dragged back, as the Americans watch, paralyzed with indecision, strung between leaving with their precious cargo and forgetting what they have seen, or helping these people escape. As the tortured Iraqi rebel is dragged back, one of Saddam's soldier's kills his wife.

Russell somehow extracts the full expressive potential from each bullet. Instead of numbing battle scenes with fifteen million ricocheting bullets, he slows down the path of each shot fired. Instead of "Bang! Bang!" we hear "bang. whoosh. thump. slosh" as the bullet travels through air and into the body of its victim, where Russell, with hyper-colored special effects, intrepidly follows it.

However, the threat of a Court Martial hangs over their heads, and this element of self-interest in their pact with the refugees gives the movie added moral dimension, as we realize that this adventure is not as separate from real, post-war life as it may appear to be.

Conrad Vig, in vaudeville terms, would be the 'straight-man' of the movie. Vig is played by Spike Jonze, known not for his acting but for his directing--of music videos, for the Beastie Boys and Bjork, among others. Jonze's performance is one of the highlights of the film. He portrays Vig with a sort of unstudied exuberance, post-adolescent can-do hyperactivity, and is earnestly naive without a trace of self-parody. He delivers lines that may be almost trite in their ignorance--for example, when he asks an Iraqi rebel leader, "So, you guys think all Americans are Satan, right?" without betraying anything more improprietary than curiousity. His acting carries some of the less compelling scenes out of their self-conscious didacticism, for example, the inevitable "learning about each other's customs" moments that are inevitable in a movie that portrays the meeting of two cultures.