Three Kings - Special Edition

Action, Adventure, Comedy, Drama, War

George Clooney	Maj. Archie Gates
Mark Wahlberg	Sfc. Troy Barlow
Ice Cube	SSgt. Chief Elgin
Spike Jonze	Pfc. Conrad Vig
Cliff Curtis	Amir Abdullah
Nora Dunn	Adriana Cruz
Jamie Kennedy	PV2 Walter Wogaman
Saïd Taghmaoui	Capt. Said
Mykelti Williamson	Col. Horn
Holt McCallany	Capt. Van Meter
Said Taghmaoui

Director	David O. Russell
Producer	Paul Junger Witt; Edward McDonnell; Charles Roven
Writer	John Ridley; David O. Russell

A confident hybrid of M*A*S*H, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and Dr. Strangelove, Three Kings is one of the most seriously funny war movies ever made. Improving the premise of Kelly's Heroes with scathing intelligence, it explores the odd connection between war and consumerism in the age of Humvees and cellular phones. Writer-director David O. Russell's third film (after Spanking the Monkey and Flirting with Disaster), it's a no-holds-barred portrait of personal conscience in the volatile arena of politics, played out by one of the most gifted filmmakers to emerge in the 1990s.

George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube, and Spike Jonze (director of Being John Malkovich) play a quartet of U.S. soldiers who, disillusioned by Operation Desert Storm, decide to steal $23 million in gold hijacked from Kuwait by Saddam Hussein's army. Getting the bullion out of an Iraqi stronghold is easy; keeping it is a potentially lethal proposition. By the end of their mercenary mission, the Americans can no longer ignore wartime atrocities (and neither can we--the film is boldly unflinching), and conscience demands their aid to Iraqi rebels abandoned by President George Bush's fickle wartime policy. This is serious stuff indeed, but Russell infuses Three Kings with a keen sense of the absurd, and the entire film is an exercise in breathtaking visual ingenuity. Despite a conventional ending that's mildly disappointing for such a brashly original film, Three Kings conveys the brutal madness of war while making you laugh out loud at the insanity. --Jeff Shannon