Say this for David O. Russell -- he's got a lot of guts. And for a while it looked like they weren't all his own.

Russell is the director of Three Kings, the imaginative action-comedy-drama Gulf War tale starring George Clooney that opens in theaters today. It has been appropriately well-reviewed and praised in most critical circles and may mark a breakthrough for the maverick director.

But Three Kings is also causing a stir not because of the way comic and dramatic elements mesh in its script or because Clooney and co-star Mark Wahlberg look so good. It's being noticed because of one particularly graphic scene.

In this scene, Special Forces veteran Clooney is driving across the desert with three comparative innocents, reservists called up for the war, who are lamenting that they haven't seen any action. Clooney says something like, "You want to see some action?", then pulls off the road.

There, on the bleached desert sand, he shows the men charred corpses and bodies blown apart. And he describes what a bullet does when it enters a body.

While Clooney speaks, Russell shows us what a bullet looks like blowing a hole through the body cavity, how bile flows, how the organs and muscles within the body seem to panic. It is very graphic and disturbing.

Here's what made the scene even more disturbing for some people: This week, Newsweek reported that Russell used an actual human corpse in, er, shooting it.

This stirred up quite a storm. The New York Daily News reported that police in Casa Grande, Ariz., where the film was shot, were looking into whether it was legal to shoot a dead guy in their town.

How this was supposed to work, since all the organs and muscles in the body are pumping and grinding away during the scene, begged for a bit of explanation. And a few days after the Newsweek report came out, Russell gave it: There was no real corpse.

Turns out Russell was kidding when he told the Newsweek reporter he'd shot a cadaver to get the special effect.

Ha ha, those directors. What cards.

Outrage was quick to build when the first report came out. Sure we like to see hundreds of people mashed beneath the feet of thousand-foot monsters, we enjoy watching a bad guy go down in a hail of bullets, and who doesn't love watching the Terminator put his hand through a guy's chest ... but we don't want to see the real thing, do we?

Well, do we?

Actually, I'm pretty glad we won't know the answer to that question anytime soon. Three Kings is a very good movie. It was going to be more than a little depressing watching it turn into a circus where audiences rush to see a dead guy get shot in the guts.

At the same time it was going to be a bit depressing if no one came to see the movie because of the dead guy's guts.

Luckily it turns out there is no dead guy, just movie guts. And the film, which dares to be an action film in which gratuitous violence is never praised and in which Russell bangs home time and again the real consequences of guns and war and political madness, will stand on its own merits.

There are enough victims of violence in films and in real life already. Let's not start shooting dead guys, too. 

You walk into ''Three Kings'' expecting another wiseguy war movie.You walk out amazed and refreshed by the way it kicks the assumptions out from under the genre - including the assumption that the other side is faceless cannon fodder. While George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, and Ice Cube rightly will sell the tickets as scamsters in uniform whose hearts prove bigger than their larcenous impulses at the tail end of the 1991 Gulf War, the real hero is David O. Russell. His barbed script and direction make you realize how unexamined the war movie is. Usually it's so busy celebrating the heroism of the combatants that it never gets around to the larger political issues attached to this or that war. ''Three Kings'' has a strong enough sense of the absurd to tee off on them.

''Three Kings'' is only Hollywood's second Gulf War-themed movie, but it loses no time getting on the board with its view that the war wasn't motivated by noble principle, but by no larger vision than perceived economic expediency, and that it proceeded with the same confusion and lack of overview as in Vietnam. No less remarkably, it contains sympathetic Iraqis and allows them to be as human as the GIs. It also reminds us that a lot of what happens once the shooting starts is arbitrary, capricious, and unpredictable. Yet for all of its maverick energies, ''Three Kings'' never yields to cynicism, even though it begins in a cynical vein, with a ''Kelly's Heroes''-like scheme by a few GIs to steal some gold the Iraqis took from Kuwait, and give themselves a golden parachute into civilian life.

Ironically, the gold bugs never saw combat. As the film opens, they're reservists celebrating the victorious end of the war at a base behind the front lines. When Clooney's smart but jaded officer on the verge of retirement  hears that gold is buried in a nearby village, he can't resist loading a few confederates into a Humvee, assuming they need only do a little runout behind the enemy lines and they'll all be rich and back in their tents by lunchtime. Of course, it doesn't turn out that way. Although the war's outcome has been settled, the shooting has hardly stopped. When Clooney and the others get to the parched village and find not only the gold bars but bunkers stuffed with loot ranging from computers to Cuisinarts, they realize that a detachment of Saddam's Republican Guard standing menacingly by is indifferent to the presence of the Americans.

The reason is that the Republican Guard is there to kill Iraqi rebels. Heartened by the hollow words of President Bush, the rebels are ecstatic to see the GIs and think the soldiers have been sent to help. But the rebels soon realize they've been hung out to dry by the lack of US follow-through. It's fun to watch Clooney struggle to suppress the remnants of his tattered   idealism, stick to his plan, drive out with the gold, and leave the rebels to die. But the gold is so heavy that he needs the rebels to help transport it. Next thing they know, they're exchanging gunfire with the Republican Guard detachment and they're committed, cursing at the complications that have arisen in what they thought would be something as simple as knocking over an ATM. Instead, they're huddled in a rebel sanctuary, plotting a counterattack, amusingly made possible by a fleet of stolen stretch limos.

Not only is the cool of Clooney's veteran tested by the need to satisfy conscience, stash the gold, and get back before they're all declared AWOL; during a skirmish Wahlberg's simpatico reservist from Detroit, who wants only to get back to his wife and kids, is captured and tortured by Iraqis. The film doesn't mind reminding us that the Iraqis were trained by the United States to fight the Iraqi-Iran war, then turned that training against their own people, Kuwait, and, briefly, us. The film's way of riding the fact that the game plan changes with every new turn of circumstance peaks when Wahlberg's resourceful prisoner plucks a cell phone from a pile of stolen gear and phones his wife in Detroit, who in turn phones his position in to headquarters.

Meanwhile, Clooney and the others, aided immensely by a warm characterization from Ice Cube, keep the desert improvisations coming, with Clooney's good-guy roguishness (reminiscent of his charming thief in ''Out of Sight'') keeping the film tilted toward impudent comic unpredictability. As if to guard against prettification, Russell's camera drains color from the desert settings, emphasizing the gritty harshness of the situation, which ends on a satisfyingly pragmatic note and escapes the need for ersatz moral epiphanies. If these GIs behave like good guys, it's not because that's their first choice. ''Three Kings'' is a resourceful and even witty film that irreverently reinvents the war movie and ambitiously saves its best shots for military mythmaking and the myopic lunges that sometimes pass for US foreign policy. It's the ''M*A*S*H'' of the Gulf War. 

(October 1, 1999 12:34 a.m. EDT http://www.nandotimes.com) - It is symptomatic of the sickness of today's studio system that David O. Russell's "Three Kings" had a rough road through the Warner Bros. hierarchy. Certain executives apparently were more willing to spend $150 million on the creatively impaired "Wild Wild West" than $40 million (final budget $50 million) on Russell's unique concept of a modern war movie.

Fortunately for Russell and the moviegoing public, more farseeing minds prevailed, and "Three Kings" was made. The result is an engrossing adventure brimming with wit, yet with enough pathos and political comment to raise it far above the macho films aimed at the puberty market.

"Three Kings" has been compared to everything from "M*A*S*H" to "Schindler's List." What it most resembles is George Stevens' 1939 "Gunga Din," in which three adventurers also combined wit and battle.

Actually there are four kings, each a unique personality:

--Capt. Archie Gates (George Clooney) knows how to make end runs around the Army brass as a career soldier.

--Green Beret Sgt. Troy Barlow (Mark Wahlberg) is a reservist, a patriotic soldier who pines for his wife and new daughter in Detroit.

--Staff Sgt. Chief Elgin (Ice Cube) has been called up from his dreary job as an airport baggage handler; he has been bruised by his life at home and in the Army and finds solace in his Christian beliefs.

--Pvt. Conrad Vig (Spike Jonze), an unwitting clown who repeatedly exposes his lack of education.

The Persian Gulf War has ended with none of the quartet having seen action. Bored and restless, Gates concocts a crazy scheme: stealing the stash of gold that Saddam Hussein reportedly stole from the Kuwaitis.

A map is discovered in a curious part of an Iraqi prisoner's anatomy. Gates commandeers it, and he believes it leads the way to a bunker containing the bullion (Vig wonders if that's the stuff that comes in tiny cubes that you make soup with).

The four set out on their adventure, regardless of the AWOL risk. Though there is an air of bravado, the action is not all fun and games. Russell also portrays the viciousness of a wartime atmosphere, on both sides. Blood is spilt, atrocities are committed, sorrow is felt.

Russell has created a marvel of invention to hold the audience's rapt attention. He employs techniques of the Nouvelle Vague: slow motion, quick cuts, still photos. He also varies the film's print quality - at times giving the effect of a documentary; at other times, a glossy Hollywood film. No American director since Orson Welles has used the screen so innovatively.

After a slow start in features, Clooney began his big-screen emergence with "Out of Sight." "Three Kings" confirms his status as an action star. Wahlberg, impressive in "Boogie Nights," shows emotional range as the homesick citizen warrior.

The versatile rap star Ice Cube brings a powerful sensitivity to his role as the moral force among the brigands. Amazingly, Jonze, director of music videos and the current feature "Being John Malkovich," has never acted in a film. He turns out to be a brilliant comedian.

Comedian Nora Dunn brightens every scene as the pushy, profane TV reporter who will do anything for an exclusive story. 

REVIEW THREE KINGS *** 1/2``Three Kings'' is the only movie that ever made me duck.

Plenty of movies have explosions, but the bombs in ``Three Kings'' explode right at us, tanks drive over us, and emotions are shoved in our faces. David O. Russell's bold, pushy tragicomedy shotguns us right into Desert Storm and introduces us to the gooniest guys there. Then, having tricked us into yukking at the idiocies of war, it peels back the laughter to show us the hurt and unfairness left in the wake of George Bush's now-we-support-you/now-we-don't Kuwaiti "stance.''

"Three Kings'' hurls a bomb at the lie of Desert Storm, which was that we were there to help. Its somewhat underdeveloped characters, soldiers played by George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube and Spike Jonze, don't know what the war is about and aren't even sure if it's over, but they do know that Saddam Hussein stole a bunch of gold from the Kuwaitis and that they know how to swipe it from him. One problem: There are some very real Kuwaitis standing between the soldiers and the gold and, if they don't help the Kuwaitis, Saddam's goons will kill them for sure.

Russell uses a predatory camera, shocking fantasy sequences, flash-forwards, flashbacks and surreal explanatory scenes (like one that takes us inside a corpse to show us the trajectory of a bullet) to let us know that he's in charge here and that anything can happen. It's as if the motivations of the soldiers (and their country) are so bewildering that Russell can capture them only by inventing a new language, much as Beck did in his record, ``Odelay,'' and Tom Wolfe did in his writing. Even if you don't have attention deficit disorder, you might want to take Ritalin before braving this cut-and-paste barrage of images and ideas.

"Three Kings's'' tone is constantly shifting, from outraged to bemused to stunned, and so is our response. From the first, our "heroes'' seem like pretty bad guys, spouting racist cracks and asserting that the most important thing in life is necessity (``Love?'' someone offers as a potential ``most important thing,'' to which Clooney replies, dismissively, ``A little too Disneyland, isn't it?'').

But what emerges from Russell's assault-rifle filmmaking is something surprisingly simple: the message that it's easy to disregard the feelings of a nation of people, but harder to ignore one person, face-to-face. ``Three Kings'' is about weighing the needs of one person against the needs of a community, about rescuing some good from a situation that's designed to be bad and about the modest, conflicted image of Ice Cube becoming a good guy as he prays, "Jesus, save this man. He isn't a bad man." America wasn't in Kuwait to help, according to the ``Three Kings,'' but some Americans were.

You come out of it shell-shocked because it shows you the humor and the horror of war. And because it refuses to let you duck.

SHOULD YOU GO? It's tough stuff, but it's great stuff. 

Hundreds of fans came out to cheer their favorite Hollywood royalty--"Three Kings' " George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg and Ice Cube--at Mann Village Theater in Westwood on Monday night, for the premiere of Warner Bros.' Desert Storm adventure movie.

And they weren't disappointed. Other Tinseltown bluebloods on hand included Salma Hayek, Cindy Crawford, Spike Jonze (who plays the "fourth king") and wife Sofia Coppola, Donnie and Robert Wahlberg (Mark's bros), "South Park" boys Trey Parker and Matt Stone and a slew of Clooney's "ER" pals, including Alex Kingston, Eriq La Salle and Laura Innes.

Ever the chronicler, writer-director David O. Russell captured the whole experience, from red-carpet arrivals to the after-party at the UCLA / Armand Hammer Museum, on his Sony Digital camera. Asked about his inspiration for the film, Russell replied, "So much of the idea for this picture came from the L.A. Times [Gulf War] book, day by day through the war," and then quickly added, "not enough to sue us for the rights, though." 

With his uncommonly assured first two films, "Spanking the Monkey" and the pitch-perfect "Flirting With Disaster," the writer and director David O. Russell didn't need much to make an indelible impression.

His timing was fabulous, his ideas fresh and his taboo-busting imagination much to be admired. Now Russell moves onto a much bigger battlefield with "Three Kings," an absurdist, gimlet-eyed "Catch-22" for the Persian Gulf War.

It's ultimately a much more ambitious and impassioned work. But it isn't nearly as successful a showcase for this filmmaker's extraordinary talents.

Though Russell is most impressive for his writing and his immensely witty direction of  actors, "Three Kings" begins by placing its emphasis firmly elsewhere: on the camera. Against the huge, bleached panorama of a desert war, which is ending just as the film begins, he sets out to convey the amorality and chaos of the situation.

American soldiers celebrate with frat-party abandon and without the faintest interest in what their victory actually means to the people of Iraq. All they know is that they want to go home.

The film captures some of this malaise through the wisecracking of its principals: Special Forces Capt. Archie Gates (George Clooney), a shrewd cowboy type; Sgt. Troy Barlow (Mark Wahlberg), a new father, and Staff Sgt. Chief Elgin (Ice Cube), who is as devout and serious as some of the others are cavalier.

These three may not sound like soldier of fortune material, but they wind up joining forces in a scheme to liberate (i.e., steal) a huge stash of confiscated gold.

In investing this not so unfamiliar premise with energy and novelty, Russell experiments nervously with music-video camera styles. This is a tactic that can and does wind up inadvertently distracting.

The best parts of "Three Kings" concern the crazy paradoxes that the three principals discover, like a bunker full of luxury cars in mid-desert, where civilians are terrified and desperate, and Russell's casual expertise in letting the Iraqis' ordeal begin to color the Americans' story.

The filmmaker's strong implicit criticism of the Bush administration's wartime policy, in which Iraqi rebels were encouraged to challenge Saddam Hussein and then left to the mercy of his army, did not need jazzing up. It comes through most clearly in the increasingly intense and single-minded performances of the film's leading men.

The Pandora's box of camera tricks that is opened here must surely have been intended to capture the speed and disorientation of wartime experience, and the jittery atmosphere in which soldiers' snap judgments are made.

But it takes a sure hand to know when to eliminate the superfluous and let a story unfold on its own terms.

When Russell begins to do that in the latter half of "Three Kings," his film begins homing in on the political and moral conundrums that were always at the heart of this material. But when that finally happens, it remains too little, too late. 

Few recent movies have aspired to work on so many levels -- and pulled it off so smoothly -- as David O. Russell's hugely entertaining and subversive war flick Three Kings.

Not only does the film combine engaging action, rowdy black comedy and stinging political commentary into an exhilarating whole, it also goes in search of the meaning of modern war, fresh perspectives on consumerism and America's role in world politics. For most filmmakers, so much material would be too much to chew on. But for writer-director Russell (Flirting With Disaster), it's a chance to re-imagine the modern war film with style and brilliance.

Three Kings takes place in March, 1991, just as the Gulf War has come to an end. Saddam Hussein has left Kuwait and a ceasefire has been declared. American soldiers stationed in the Persian Gulf, many of whom never saw combat while the war was being fought by high-tech specialists, are ready to head home.

But three of these soldiers -- Army Sergeant Troy Barlow (Mark Wahlberg), Staff Sergeant Chief Elgin (Ice Cube) and Private Conrad Vig (Spike Jonze) -- stumble upon one last adventure when they find a map that appears to indicate where the Iraqis hid the gold they stole from Kuwait. When Special Forces Captain Archie Gates (George Clooney) decides to become part of the action, the four men plan to steal the enemy loot.

The next morning, the soldiers borrow a Humvee and set off in the direction of the gold. Since the bullion remains in the hands of Saddam's army, they have no qualms about claiming it as their own.

This moral nonchalance hits a barricade, however, once our protagonists reach their destination. Stopping in a small village, the soldiers are welcomed with open arms by Iraqi civilians who have been encouraged by U.S. President Bush to stand up for themselves, with the promise that they will get U.S. support for their efforts. For these four men, this foray into a war-ravaged town stands as their first face-to-face encounter with the men and women who are stuck in the middle of a country at war with itself.

The Americans try to pay little attention to the local politics as they load their vehicles with the stolen gold, but Gates and Elgin, a devout Christian, soon have crises of conscience and decide to respond to the threat of the Iraqi soldiers. Before long, the ceasefire has been broken, the soldiers have adopted a group of Iraqis who want their help fleeing the country and the war has gotten all too personal for Gates, Barlow, Elgin and Vig. Their mission has changed from one of greed to one of survival, redemption and moral choice.

Russell has made a name for himself on the independent circuit with the smart comedies Spanking the Monkey (1994) and Flirting With Disaster (1996), but neither of those films could have prepared us for the thoughtful aggressiveness and sly dark humour of Three Kings. What other film would try to make serious statements about war and America's foreign policy at the same time that it features an exploding cow, a milk river, a Bart Simpson doll and a close-up of a needle stab that makes Pulp Fiction look like child's play?

- Rating four out of five

GIs find a treasure map in the desert

The Gulf War death tolls were sandwiched between commercial breaks and the spoils belonged to everyone but the indigenous Arab people, whose jaded contempt for America somehow couldn't stop them, back in '91, from hoarding oodles of our pop tchotchkes.

So it is with heavy comic shame that ""Three Kings'' heads into Saddam-terrorized Iraq after America pulled out. It's the kind of hilarious shame that's so embarrassed it's de-nationalist, wearing its Purple Heart, U.S. flag, gold star, whatever, on the inside of its sleeve. But ""Three Kings'' in all its ragged, sand-swept glory is still a work of strangely bold, distinctly American pop art -- proud to be ashamed, ashamed to be proud, unafraid to ignore its commercial bearings 'cause it can laugh all the way to MENSA before it stops at the bank.

""Three Kings,'' is a post-colonial, post-war, action-heist- comedy-satire-farce-screwball circus that's like ""M*A*S*H'' being churned by a sneering, over-amped organ grinder.

His name is David O. Russell and the writer-director, after two movies, has revealed himself as a filmmaker who officially matters. With this, he's invited himself into the (lack of) combat-induced hangover that was the end of the Gulf War and he didn't bring any Tylenol, just more ammo for its pandemonious after-party.

For the guys in "Three Kings," the Gulf War was more FUBAR than trying to save Private Ryan, and most of them didn't even fight. In fact, when we're introduced to a bunch of guys in the Army Reserve, their trigger fingers itch and they're butt-sore from riding the Gulf War bench. So they play desert games and Sgt. Troy Barlow (Mark Wahlberg) accidentally shoots a guy.

Cut to: those same soldiers and a couple of dozen more cracking a few beers and turning a tent-barracks into a makeshift frat house cold-rocking to Public Enemy and Snap; Special Forces Capt. Archie Gates (solid George Clooney, doing no wrong) humping the pretty, mock-CNN correspondent (Judy Greer) on a chair.

Naturally, when Troy and his hick sidekick, Pvt. Conrad Vig (videomaker Spike Jonze), discover a treasure map protruding from an Iraqi's nether region like a bad suppository, they see it as an opportunity to get some action and some bank.

The map leads to tens of millions in dollars in gold that Saddam Hussein stole from Kuwait, and the four guys who go after it are high on "Kelly's Heroes" bravado. They hop in a Humvee, thinking it'll be relatively easy to retrieve the loot, as if being Americans not only entitles them to the gold's re-theft, but empowers them.

One blown-up cow, one exploded milk tanker and dozens of angry, agonizing Kuwaitis later, Archie, Troy, Conrad and God-fearing, Jesus-loving Chief Elgin (Ice Cube) are more emasculated than they were when they jumped in that Humvee, drowning in more fabulously chintzy merchandise than a "Wheel of Fortune" marathon.

In fact, there's so much stuff -- Bart Simpson dolls, miles of denim, Benzes, Bentleys, Luis Vuitton luggage, stereos, TVs, now outmoded cell phones -- the film looks like it's awash in the detritus of a busted pinata. (And in Russell's haywire, anything-is-possible care it wouldn't be surprising if it was Pat and Vanna who broke it open.)

In one great moment, Archie, Troy and Chief stumble into a lair with the gold, guarded by Saddam sentinels entranced by news footage of the Rodney King beating and smitten with Eddie Murphy's "Party All the Time," which may as well be the jam of the year over there.

It's a harrowing, funny, surreally grotesque scene woozy and taut with all the film's media, racial pop-culture tensions. At its crassest and most complex, the Gulf War was about stuff.

"Three Kings" owes a great deal to Robert Altman's "M*A*S*H," which was as intricately folded into itself as an origami M-16. Its comedy came from the irony that a college dorm/paradise and a war environment could coexist, so long as Altman and his characters were flipping anti-establishment birds. But infused in "Three Kings" shenanigans is a sober biblicality and sense of greater good that Altman, at his most flippant, didn't have to assume.

Russell's film treads the same land-mine-strewn dangerous ground Iraq intended for the Bush administration with the right-minded wherewithal to try to do the right thing in a desert in which everything is so foreign and wrong it may as well be set on Tatooine.

But if "Party All the Time" is the film's unofficial theme, Russell supplies a beautiful, searing comedown in which the Arab characters speak for themselves.

Amir (Cliff Curtis), a displaced Kuwaiti leading a group of fellow refugees, agrees to help the soldiers carry the bag of gold across the desert, if Archie, Chief and Conrad help them get across the Iraq-Kuwait border. That request is juxtaposed with Said, one of Saddam's soldiers ("L'Haine" star Sai·d Taghmaoui) strapping Troy to a chair and electro-shocking him.

It's an exquisitely executed scene with the enthralling Taghmaoui turning anguish into quiet seething as Said articulates his grief over having lost his family in a war that in his estimation was about oil.

It's an encounter that begins with a metaphorical question about Michael Jackson and ends in torture. We've seen the American-gets-abused-foreigner sequence before, but never with the personal-political dimensions operating here.

Curtis and Taghmaoui are two of the great performances eddying around the film, which gives Walhberg's sweaty deadpan the comic hue it's needed. He's never been more dynamically effective, along with Cube, expertly throwing lines away like they were leftover casseroles; and Jonze playing a churlish Timothy McVeigh is da bomb.

Mykelti Williamson is the hothead captain looking for the AWOL soldiers. And Jamie Kennedy plays a Gomer Pyle-ish private assigned to distract Nora Dunn's acerbic, staggeringly funny Christiane Amanpour knock-off from doing a story on Archie and the treasure.

Russell's filmmaking takes on the overlit, schizo, shifting-film-stock crazy-cutting of an Oliver Stone day-mare in which the sun even seems to wear a party hat. The frenetic roving hand-held cinematography-stuntwork by Newton Thomas Sigel and Robert K. Lambert's editing as Sigel's partner in breakneck crime create the dizzy disorientation of its setting.

The style also complements Russell's screen-writing, which is still as character-obsessed as "Spanking the Monkey" or "Flirting With Disaster," only now it's the characters' content that matters as opposed to their neurotic dysfunction, suggesting Russell has learned to stop worrying and just ride the SCUD, Slim Pickens-style, into oblivion.

EVALUATION ÷.÷.÷.ì