Every war has its own texture, at least in the movies, which is the only way most of us will ever experience war. The First World War was Christmas in the muddy trenches, among the lice and crying men. The Second World War was the Italian from the Bronx and the Jewish kid from Jersey and the farm boy from Idaho, all there for apple pie justice: it is the genius of Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan that he could take that melting pot mosaic, blow its arms off and still make us care for it. Vietnam was down-the-river insanity to the stench of napalm and the sound of rock and roll.

The Gulf War, the one we know from television -- Baghdad in night-vision green, CNN on the roof, Iraqi soldiers crawling out of desert hideouts on their knees -- has been reinvented as David O. Russell's very own creation in Three Kings, a deeply moral and geopolitically astute film that nonetheless manages to blow up very convincingly. Three Kings is a war we think we know redefined in washed-out colours and bleak vistas, a war of purloined Rolexes and stacks of Kuwaiti food processors, of self-interest and shifting allies. This is a war movie that arises out of a sensibility one step past postmodernism; it wears its irony casually, like a GI's flak jacket, and it takes it off for the big battle scenes.

In Three Kings, a group of non-conformist soldiers at the end of the Gulf War find a map that will lead them to millions in stolen Kuwaiti bullion. "Sadaam stole it from the sheikhs," says Capt. Archie Gates (George Clooney), leader of the fortune-hunters. "I have no trouble stealing it from Sadaam."

Russell finds the absurd tone of the war from the first shots of Sgt. Troy Barlow (Mark Wahlberg) spotting an enemy soldier in the desert, asking around whether they're supposed to be shooting them now that Iraq has surrendered, getting no answer, and firing a bullet through the man's neck. Three Kings has the usual dose of war film bloodletting, but it takes it uncommonly seriously; it may be the first war movie that not only shows us what bullets can do, but actually takes us inside the human body for a lesson in blood poisoning and internal organ damage.

The post-truce killing is part of the celebration of armed Yankee know-how that you may remember from that odd period when the war was over but the soldiers hadn't quite left yet and nothing seemed settled, seeing as how Sadaam was still in place. We see the joyous, chaotic, camera-hogging victory dance of the drunken soldier; only in Wahlberg, turning away in sick grief at what he has done, do we see the humanity.

His Sgt. Barlow is one of the good guys: when he rounds up prisoners-of-war, he doesn't hurt them, he's polite. "Sir," he'll say to one, "we're going to need you to disrobe like all the other towel-heads." The unthinking racism is one of many targets of Three Kings.

During this operation Barlow and Sgt. Elgin (Ice Cube) come upon a map to the stolen gold -- the hiding place of the map is one of the film's odd surprises -- and with the undereducated Private Conrad Vig (Spike Jonze, the video director, in a hilarious turn), they are enlisted by Capt.Gates to sneak off and grab the gold.

At this point, Three Kings takes a turn. It's not an unheard-of turn; the film's morality is part of a war movie tradition that stretches back to Kelly's Heroes and beyond, but in Russell's hands it becomes an unconventional examination of American foreign policy. The first shock in Three Kings comes in the humanizing of the Arab characters, who are first regarded as a vast foreign other, then turned into allies of a sort, common enemies of Saddam who are being abandoned by President Bush and the American army that was sent out to save them.

It's not a new viewpoint, but it's new in mainstream Hollywood. Three Kings is being described as an independent movie made by a studio, and that comes out most clearly in its subversive take on what really happened in the Gulf.

At the same time, Russell fills the film with the quirky oxymorons of the modern, oil-driven conflict: convoys of luxury cars rolling through the sand, a running debate about whether Lexus makes a convertible or whether that's just Infiniti, Arab women walking in hijabs and sunglasses and carrying designer luggage filled with bars of gold, the matter-of-fact hegemony of American power and American guns and American TV exposure, and the world's unblinking surrender to the cultural crush.

Three Kings is a wonderfully made film and a cleverly written one as well. It lives up to the promise of Flirting With Disaster and Spanking the Monkey, and it establishes David O. Russell as one of the finest young film-makers in the world.

Three Kings also works as action, but it's an angled kind of action. George Clooney is very fine as the soldier who is driven by necessity; his screen charisma grows with each picture, but few other action stars could have brought off the conversion. Same for Mark Wahlberg, who shows, as he did in Boogie Nights, a knowing vulnerability that is at odds with his early sex symbol image. Ice Cube, another former rapper, is also fine, although his religious affiliations seemed stranded in the story. The movie has trouble with its third act as well, gathering a rather ungainly group for a rah-rah finish, if not exactly the mother of all patriotic endings.

Three Kings is ultimately about the power of America, for good or ill, a theme that may not sit well. It is the theme of the Gulf War, however, and of all wars these days, and we may not have seen it expressed as bravely, or with such surreal panache.

Mark Wahlberg is not a man of his word.

"When I decided I would give acting a try, I swore there were three things I'd never do in a film," recalls the rapper-turned-underwear model-turned-actor.

"I vowed I would never sing, dance or take my clothes off. In Boogie Nights, I did all three. I'm never saying I'll never do some specific thing again because I know I'll break my word big-time."

You won't hear Wahlberg saying he's not about to share the screen with George Clooney ever again.

The actors met last year on the set of the Gulf War drama Three Kings, which opens tomorrow. They play soldiers searching for the bunkers where Saddam Hussein hid the massive gold reserves and treasures he stole from Kuwait.

Clooney and Wahlberg are currently working together on the disaster-at-sea movie The Perfect Storm. It was Clooney who went to bat for Wahlberg.

"I got cast first in Perfect Storm. When I read the screenplay, I wanted Mark to star opposite me. He's one of the most inventive, giving actors I've worked with," says Clooney.

"It took a bit of arm twisting because we're teamed up in Three Kings. My argument was I want Mark and I to become the new Bing Crosby and Bob Hope."

Wahlberg runs with the joke, adding: "All I want to do for the rest of my career is be George's little sidekick. I think he has a crush on me. Believe me, I could do worse."

Such horseplay marks a major step for Wahlberg, who was once accused of being homophobic and of roughing up a gay man.

"None of that was me. It was just a perception of me derived from my music and my rapper persona," insists the former Marky Mark.

"I can joke about those days and that image because it is so far behind me now. People are actually taking me seriously as an actor."

In 1988, when he was 15, Wahlberg was sentenced to 45 days in jail for assaulting a man with a beer bottle.

"It was the wakeup call I needed. I always knew there'd come a day when I'd get caught and they'd throw away the key. Lucky for me, they just kept it hidden for 45 days."

In Three Kings, Wahlberg doesn't sing or dance, but he does take his shirt off and he does run around in his underwear.

It's all part of a chilling torture sequence and, in a sense, it was torture.

Three years ago, Wahlberg had three massive tattoos imprinted on his body.

"It took two hours in makeup to cover the tattoos. Because we were filming in the (Arizona) desert, the makeup would run or wear thin and I'd be getting touched up two or three times a day.

"I've exposed my tattoos in other movies, but this time I didn't think they worked for my character.

"He's a bit too conventional a guy."

NEW YORK - Measured in human lives, what's $800 million in gold bullion really worth?

That's what George Clooney - playing a me-me-me anti-hero - has to ask himself when things get down to the nitty-gritty in Three Kings, a provocative Gulf War action comedy opening Friday. Co-starring Ice Cube and Mark Wahlberg, the film offers the usual intense battle sequences, but it also serves up uninhibited humor (Saturday Night Live's Nora Dunn as a Christiane Amanpour type) and pointed jabs at American policy during the Gulf War.

It's uncommonly political for a Hollywood action feature. And like last summer's crime comedy Out of Sight, it's part of Clooney's effort to broaden his range beyond the heartthrob roles (on TV's ER and in films like One Fine Day) that have  most successfully defined his image.

And it's a movie Clooney, 38, almost didn't get to make.

Conceived originally as a project for Clint Eastwood, Three Kings mutated when David O. Russell came aboard. The writer/director of quirky hit indies including Flirting with Disaster rewrote the project, recasting the lead younger and with Nicolas Cage in mind.

But Cage was committed to Bringing Out the Dead (also due in October). Mel Gibson was next to flirt with Kings, but he eventually passed. That gave Clooney, who'd been eyeing the project, the window he needed to jump aboard.

"There's that list (of stars) above me, and I have to wait and see who's not available and who doesn't want to do these things," the actor says.

And Clooney was determined to make Three Kings: "I started chasing David around, and I had pictures of him with farm animals, and that worked," he says, deadpan.

"What's great about this movie is it talks about the danger of policing the entire world," Clooney adds. "Which is, there are great responsibilities that come with it. The film doesn't make the bad guys good, but it does say we kill a lot of people (while trying to protect them). It isn't designed to be your political primer on the Gulf War; it's an entertainment. But if it opens discussions and makes you go and read about it, then I think that's all the better."

Hobbled by Dr. Ross?

There's no consensus on whether Clooney's move from ladies' man to leading man is working - Out of Sight did only modest box office, though critics liked it. But the actor seems to be getting credit for trying.

"Like most Hollywood stars, the big problem he faces is finding the right material," says Martin Grove, analyst for CNN's Showbiz Today and The Hollywood Reporter. None of Clooney's starring vehicles - Batman & Robin, The Peacemaker, One Fine Day - have been breakthrough hits, though the gore fest From Dusk Till Dawn drew a cult following.

But Clooney "hasn't made any terrible mistakes," says Premiere magazine West Coast editor Anne Thompson. Film stardom takes time, she says, and Clooney has all the essential elements: "a little danger, a lot of masculinity and a great deal of charm. And he's smart. The right director can plumb some interesting depths there."

Kings director Russell admits he initially couldn't see past the Clooney whose Dr. Ross made ER fans swoon week after week. "Then I met him and realized that, though he's as good-looking as he can be, he's from Kentucky and he has this grizzled quality, and he's a jock."

Grove agrees: "He's from the same sort of rough but attractive mold that Clark Gable was struck from." But "in Gable's day, studios heads picked the stars' material, and they were virtually infallible in knowing what each star should be doing. Stars today are much less good."

So how good was Clooney in picking Three Kings? "He looks great and handles it well, but the role isn't there," Grove says.

For his own part, Clooney says he doesn't worry about such guessing and second-guessing. He's a fan of James Garner, who's seen primarily as a TV star despite a solid run in films (The Great Escape, Victor/Victoria), and he wonders aloud: "Would I be destroyed or devastated if that happened?"

He shrugs. "It happens. People will say, 'Are you going to make it in films?' You just keep working."

Sailing into the 'Storm'

After Clooney left ER in February, ratings for the nation's No. 1 series slumped more than 8%. Clooney says the dip is attributable to the show's aging, not to his exit. He's talked to executive producer John Wells about a guest appearance, though, which he's "open to" - though the rumors of a $2 million payday for such a return are "absolute whole cloth. Not an element of truth in it."

Ditto the rumor that he'll star in a big-screen Starsky and Hutch. "I just heard that the other day. It was an absolute fabrication that caught on."

He's been working nearly nonstop since leaving TV, finishing two films and starting shooting on The Perfect Storm, Wolfgang Petersen's adaptation of Sebastian Junger's international best seller about a fishing boat's doomed final voyage.

Through deals with CBS and WB, Clooney's production company is busy developing feature films and TV projects. Early next year, his company will film Metal God, a black comedy about a Judas Priest tribute band starring Wahlberg. And he's planning a live TV remake of the doomsday classic Fail-Safe for CBS next spring.

"My feeling is if I'm going to be involved in any kind of television at all, you have to do some interesting, risky things," Clooney says, "and I think this will be a fun one."

Sidney Lumet's 1964 original, with Henry Fonda as a U.S. president who can't recall a malfunctioning bomber headed for Moscow with a nuclear payload, is Clooney's "favorite film of all time. It's a great story about accidental warfare, and timely - and not just because of Y2K, which is scare tactics."

Speaking of which: "We're going to do it after the millennium because we don't want to do just a War of the Worlds and scare people."

He'll produce the show in black-and-white because "the lesson I learned from doing ER live is, live color doesn't look good. It looks like cheap videotape. Black-and-white gives you a live look, but it's also still cinematic. Since we're going to keep the story set in 1963 or '64, you might as well keep it black-and-white."

In 'good taste'

Then there those who think Clooney should stick with what's been most successful for him: agreeable-heartthrob roles.

He's not so sure.

"I think audiences will go places (with me). If I just try and focus on good scripts, and if my taste is good (and so far I've been lucky because I think my taste has been good), I think eventually an audience will find its way to me.

"Which would be good."

`Three Kings': A crowning achievement

Gulf war film proves to be much more than just an adventure flick

Writer/director David O. Russell's "Three Kings" is the first major film to be set entirely within the Persian Gulf War. But it's not exactly what the Pentagon had in mind.

Exhibiting a savage eye both for the absurd contradictions of modern warfare and the elements that make up the American character, Russell has stirred together an adventure story, a dark comedy and a war film, and delivered this roiling gumbo with an unforgettable visual and aural flourish. "Three Kings" entertains on the surface; delve deeper and it's an unblinking examination of who we are.

He sets the tone in the first scene. Sgt. Troy Barlow (Mark Wahlberg) spots his first enemy soldier only after the official end of hostilities. The man is standing on a sand dune waving his rifle -- whether in surrender or defiance is hard to say.

"Are we shooting people?" Troy asks his platoon members, none of whom grasps the protocol of such a situation. So Troy fires at the distant target; then he must watch, sickened, as the twitching man dies. His buddies congratulate him on getting a "raghead."

"Kings" is set in motion by the discovery of a map pinpointing the desert cache where Saddam Hussein's army has hidden millions in stolen Kuwaiti gold. Archie Gates (George Clooney), a disillusioned Special Forces officer facing retirement, decides to claim it as his own.

Thrown together with Troy, along with a sergeant guided by religious visions (Ice Cube) and a thick-as-a-brick redneck (Spike Jonze), Gates makes an unauthorized strike into Iraqi territory.

Up to this point "Three Kings" could be an updated version of the old Clint Eastwood war film, "Kelly's Heroes." But once they discover the gold in a subterranean bunker, our protagonists face a conundrum. The Iraqi soldiers guarding it are willing to give up the bullion according to the terms of the cease-fire -- as long as they can go on systematically torturing and killing the dissidents who, believing George Bush's pledge of support, took up arms against Saddam's regime.

Will our boys decide to take the gold and run, or to save the innocents? Maybe both.

Russell, whose two previous films were the comedies "Spanking the Monkey" and "Flirting With Disaster," demonstrates a breathtaking faculty for effortlessly shifting gears from horror to wild comedy, sometimes within the same scene.

Often his dialogue and images flirt with surrealism. Members of Saddam's Republican Guard stand watch over vast caches of purloined Mercedes-Benzes, televisions, exercise machines and cellular phones (a captured American uses one to call his wife in California). Rap music (with lyrics in Arabic) blasts from a boombox. Say, is this a war zone or a Wal-Mart?

Pushed back from their positions, Iraqi soldiers throw down their weapons and make off with armloads of blue jeans. One remarks on the approach of a cable news network reporter: "She looks much shorter in person."

The film's violence is gut-wrenching and unromantic. In one squirm-inducing sequence Russell's camera dives into a human body to show the damage a bullet does to internal organs.

The performances are seamless and convincing -- best of the bunch are Clooney's gruff-on-the-outside, soft-on-the-inside Major Gates and Ice Cube's humanistic Every Man (he leaves his rapper persona far behind).

Technically the film is a small masterpiece, highlighted by Newton Thomas Sigel's superb cinematography -- his footage seems almost to have been bleached by the searing desert sun.

Ultimately, "Three Kings" is an examination of the conflicting desires and impulses that mold us as individuals and as a nation. Like our heroes, we are torn between avarice and an affinity for the underdog, obsessed with pop culture and yet desperately seeking spirituality, casually racist but capable of profound acts of generosity. 

In a one-upmanship town like Hollywood, it's downright shocking when direct competitors generate strong, positive buzz about another studio's movie.

For several weeks now, executives all over town have been talking up Warner Bros.' release Friday of writer-director David O. Russell's "Three Kings," a politically charged action-drama picture set at the end of the Persian Gulf War that stars George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg and Ice Cube.

So why all the fuss about a movie that some top Warner executives had serious trepidation about green-lighting in the first place?

The story, about the misadventures of a band of greedy American rogue soldiers who turn heroic after going behind enemy lines to heist gold stolen by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, is thematically reminiscent of such earlier films as "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" and "Kelly's Heroes."

What sets it apart, and even has rival execs rooting for it, is an out-there style normally reserved for independent films, not big-budget studio fare.

Russell said he looks at "Three Kings" as "an independent film done on a studio budget."

Indeed, as Warner's rivals are first to remark, it's Russell's off-center narrative and unconventional filmic style that distinguish "Three Kings" as wildly original-- the kind of film Hollywood doesn't produce enough but is often rewarded for when it does. (Think of this summer's sleeper hit "The Blair Witch Project.")

Russell employs ironic, war-themed humor even darker than "MASH" and uses unusual cinematic tricks with camera moves, atypical film stocks such as Ektachrome (normally used in home still cameras) and manic editing techniques to bring across the surreal, chaotic nature of modern warfare.

"Three Kings" was the 41-year-old's first studio film and most ambitious project yet, following his two more personal independent features, "Spanking the Monkey" and "Flirting With Disaster."

"The guidepost for me was the movies I grew up with in the '70s that were made by studios but were independently minded," said Russell, citing films such as "Klute," "Dog Day Afternoon," "Chinatown" and "Shampoo."

The movie, co-financed by Village Roadshow Pictures, cost close to $50 million with re-shoots.

"Three Kings" was a risky movie for Warner to back, given its political theme: The story unflinchingly blames the Bush administration for allegedly abandoning Iraqi civilians at the end of the war after encouraging them to rise against Hussein and pledging its help. In fact, the project was the subject of much heated internal debate about whether or not it should be made at all.

The project's strongest advocate, production President Lorenzo di Bonaventura, is said to have met with intense resistance above and below him before the production was ultimately given the go-ahead.

"Most of the great movies at Warner Bros. have had the hottest internal debates," he said, referring to other controversial releases from the studio, such as "Falling Down" and "The Matrix." Di Bonaventura noted how such works "break the formula in one way or another."

Warner faced the inherent danger of backing a film that takes a strong position on the sensitive political question of America's role in the Middle East.

Russell said that when he first started to write, "politics was never an issue. . . . They knew the kind of movie I wanted to  do and they assured me that had worked with other [fiercely independent] directors like Oliver Stone . . . and knew it was going to be different."

A few weeks before production began in fall 1998, however, Warner was seriously considering scrapping the movie because the political situation in the Middle East and elsewhere around the world had worsened, Clooney said.

Clooney recalled a meeting in which Terry Semel, then Warner co-chairman, and Jim Miller, president of the studio's theatrical business operations, told him, "We may have to reconsider doing the movie."

"They wanted me to walk away. . . . They said I was in physical danger in making the film. Planet Hollywood [in Cape Town, South Africa] had been bombed, and the political climate was becoming more volatile," Clooney said, referring to the fatal August 1998 terrorist incident that authorities suspected was linked to Muslim extremists. "They had real concerns about putting the studio's employees at risk."

The actor, who had lobbied hard to get the role of Special Forces Capt. Archie Gates, which he said Russell had written with Clint Eastwood in miind, wasn't about to let Warner kill the project.

Clooney said he wrote Semel a letter, outlining the reasons they "have to make this movie." To his credit, the actor said, "Terry called me and said, 'Let's do it.' He believed enough in this project to take a chance. He stuck his neck way out on this movie, and I was surprised because I thought we were finished."

Both Clooney and Russell credit Di Bonaventura for his unwavering support of the movie.

"Lorenzo was totally down with it, and ultimately he was backed up," Russell said. Semel and longtime partner Bob Daly had "that Steve Ross thing going on--being incredibly protective to filmmakers," he said, referring to the late Time Warner chairman.

To be sure, management was concerned about spending more than $40 million on a movie that had no slam-dunk box-office stars and was being made by a director who had never made a project of that scale. (Russell's last movie, "Flirting With Disaster," cost $7 million.)

"The real concern was not that David couldn't do it, but that he might go over budget," one Warner executive said.

The director did in fact go over schedule (by about two weeks) and the original budget of $42 million.

But Charles Roven, one of the film's producers, along with Paul Junger Witt and Ed McDonnell, said Warner came through and even "gave us money to add things while we were over budget."

Roven, whose credits include Warner's hit "City of Angels," also noted, "I've made a lot of studio movies, and this was the greatest studio experience I've ever had, because whatever we needed, we ultimately got."

Russell blames the media for "some distortions" in recounting conflicts he had with the studio, yet it was he who was recently quoted as saying: "Every step of the way, there were forces within the studio who wanted me to keep sanding down the edges."

A top Warner executive said that management had such serious concerns about the project that Di Bonaventura was made to feel as if his job was on the line if the movie didn't work.

The production chief, insisting his job was never threatened, said: "Bob and Terry showed faith in me and David by green-lighting this film. I don't think a lot of other studio heads make as many controversial movies as they were prepared to do."

* WRITER'S BEST TOOLS: For the prolific John Ridley, whose script provided the basis for "Three Kings," listening is the key to good writing. F1

Copyright 1999 / Los Angeles Times

Warner Bros. and director David O. Russell yesterday denied a report that a real corpse was used in the movie "Three Kings" to show a bullet piercing a human body. The film, starring George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg, opens Friday.

"No cadaver was used," said studio spokesperson Mark Reyna. "A prostethic was used with special effects for the bullet. No corpse was used."

Reyna was referring to a comment made by Russell in the Oct. 4 issue of Newsweek. When the unorthodox director of "Spanking the Monkey" and "Flirting With Disaster" was asked how he achieved a particularly gruesome effect in the Gulf War era film — a closeup of a man's innards after they had been pierced by a bullet — he said, "We filmed a bullet going through a cadaver.

"The studio was concerned," he told Newsweek. "They said, 'If the studio audiences don't like it, take it out.' But the preview audiences found it fascinating."

Being a Wise Guy

Russell, whose quest for accuracy included hiring an acting coach to ensure authentic Arabic accents and weeks of scouting for a flat, treeless location to simulate the Iraqi desert, now says he was joking.

"I think there was an honest misunderstanding," he says. "The intention [of the shot] was to make it look like a bullet going through a corpse. It would be unethical to use a corpse like that. To achieve the effect, we had to build a prosthesis."

Russell adds that the comment referring to the studio's reaction referred to "the idea of the shot [itself].

"I was fooling around when I said it," he says of the cadaver quote. "I was fooling around in the sense like, 'How do you think I did it?'"

Newsweek reporters David Ansen and Devin Gordon could not be reached for comment.

David O. Russell, then an aspiring filmmaker, attended his first Sundance Film Festival in 1991, but says the best show that year was not in any theater.

"The Gulf War was the best movie in town," says Russell, who would return to Sundance to win the audience award three years later with his first feature, "Spanking the Monkey." "Everything else paled in comparison. It was far more surreal than 'Apocalypse Now.' We just sat in bars and watched it on TV."

It's that sense of what Russell calls "unvarnished unreality" that he sought to capture in the kinetic comedy "Three Kings," which opens Friday. Russell's first picture for a major studio stars George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube and video director Spike Jonze as four soldiers who avoided combat while the brief war was on, but see plenty of action after it ends -- in the process of trying to steal gold from an Iraqi bunker.

He went to Warner Bros. after the indie success of "Monkey" and "Flirting with Disaster" because he "wanted to work on larger canvas and they promised the least interference." The studio offered him the chance to direct "Three Kings."

"But I never read the original script. I just pilfered the idea for another idea I had percolating for years, since I was in Central America teaching in the '70s. There was something compelling about all that chaos, of soldiers running around yelling at people, of that clash between the simple village life and the intrusion of all that intrigue in their lives."

Russell threw himself into Gulf War research and, in the process, found himself reconsidering his original opinion that it "had been essentially a media war, entered into for less than legitimate reasons."

"I came out convinced that Saddam was in fact a malicious tyrant who had inflicted great pain on the people of Iraq, and that we had been right to intervene. But our tragic mistake was in urging the Iraqis to rise up against him, and then refusing to support them when they did. Because the people who did paid a terrible price."

It's that drama that provides the backdrop for "Three Kings" -- as in "of Orient are" -- which opens the eyes of the military mercenaries to the suffering of the Iraqis. Wanting to represent the Iraqi perspective honestly, the filmmakers came to Detroit, home to one of the world's largest Middle Eastern population outside the Middle East, with many of them having fled Hussein's repression.

One of the primary advisers was Al No'mani, an Iraqi rights activist from Dearborn. He was primarily a dialect coach, teaching the Iraqi actors in the film, some of whom are also from metro Detroit, to speak English with regional accents.

"Iraq has a multitude of accents," says No'mani, who was a filmmaker and actor in Iraq, and who also has a small role in the film. ("He was like Iraq's Harrison Ford," says Russell.) " 'Three Kings' takes place in the south near Karbala, but there are also characters in the film who come from Baghdad, and they speak differently."

No'mani also was assigned the task for looking for cultural inaccuracies in gestures and attitudes.

"For instance, when a little girl sees her mother get killed, I showed her the correct Iraqi gesture when you lose someone."

Detroit is also represented by two of the film's primary characters, reservists played by Ice Cube and Wahlberg. Wahlberg plays a young husband and father who repairs office machines in the city, while Ice Cube is a Metro Airport baggage handler, introduced with the tag line "on a four-week vacation from Detroit."

"We meant no disrespect, really," says Russell, who is much more chagrined by a shot that slipped by depicting a mountain range in the airport background. "We just wanted to point out that Cube's character comes from a tough-ass place, yet can still be blown away by what he witnesses in Iraq.

"Mark actually came to Detroit last year before we started shooting to hang out, so he would have a bead on who his character was. Of course, Mark's idea of a working-class lifestyle might have been a little different, you know. I kept getting these calls from these loud bars in Detroit with Mark going 'Yo, David, guess where I am right now,' and then putting these sexy-sounding girls on the line."

Though "Three Kings" was inexpensive by Hollywood standards, costing $45 million, it was a major leap forward for Russell, who spent less than $7 million making "Flirting with Disaster." Russell says any nervousness he had about going the studio route with "Three Kings" got channeled into adrenalin, which the film has in abundance.

Nor was there any objection from Warner Bros. over his decision to use an experimental, bleached-out film stock to give the film a buzzy immediacy, or the movie's repeated references to how George Bush betrayed the Iraqis by refusing to support the doomed anti-Saddam rebellion.

"I don't think the film is anti-Bush," says Russell. "Bush himself has admitted that he wished he could have taken out Saddam when he had the opportunity. I think the film just acknowledges the loony landscape of contemporary war.  Nothing is clear anymore. All is confusion."