The R rated thriller held up far better than expected in its third weekend, hanging on to first place with a still sexy ESTIMATED $13.55 million (-20%) at 2,993 theatres (+109 theatres; $4,527 per theatre). Its cume is approximately $65.9 million, heading for $100 million in domestic theatres.

Directed by Bruce Beresford and produced by Leonard Goldberg, it stars Tommy Lee Jones and Ashley Judd.

"We're doing great," Paramount distribution president Wayne Lewellen said Sunday morning. "It's off 20%. That's incredible when you consider the picture's taken on Kevin Costner and Harrison Ford."

Asked where it's likely to wind up, Lewellen replied, "I think it goes to $100 million with this playability. I really do. I've done projections. I had it going to almost $100 million with a 35% or 36% drop this weekend. Obviously, we're doing substantially better that that.

"We're skewing older female (25 and older), but they're obviously bringing the men with them. I think the fact that she (Ashley Judd's character) is sort of the average, normal housewife and then converts in the film to a (take-action heroine is a big factor in the film's appeal to women)."

Columbia's opening of its R rated romantic thriller "Random Hearts," which insiders had expected to lead the Weekend 41 box office, placed second with an okay but nonetheless disheartening ESTIMATED $13.10 million at 2,697 theatres ($4,857 per theatre).

Directed by Sydney Pollack, it stars Harrison Ford and Kristin Scott Thomas.

"It's a good adult (film) opening, but it points out something I think most people have felt for a while -- that the idea that the fall is some kind of safe haven to release ambitious adult films is probably overrated," Sony Pictures Releasing president Jeff Blake said Sunday morning.

"This is a tough group to get right away any time of the year. Last fall, what were the biggest hits? 'Rush Hour' and 'Waterboy' (both targeted to young adults and teens). Adults in first week appointment viewing remain difficult (to attract at) any time of the year. I would say $13.1 million is a good start. It has a lot to offer so, hopefully, it will hold in."

Warner Bros.' R rated Gulf War action adventure "Three Kings" finished third in its second weekend with a still muscular ESTIMATED $11.69 million (-26%) at 2,942 theatres (theatre count unchanged; $3,972 per theatre). Its cume is approximately $32.4 million, on its way to a domestic theatrical gross of about $60 million.

Directed by David O. Russell, it stars George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg and Ice Cube.

"We had a good weekend. I'm pleased with it," Warner Bros. Distribution president Dan Fellman said Sunday morning.

"It seemed to hold up. Even in the smaller markets where we didn't open well, we held well. I was pleased with that. Our audience is probably right now about 55% male and 45% female. It's mostly over-25. It started to get a little younger this weekend, which is what we're looking for. We have good word of mouth and we'll see how the legs hold on. We're heading into the $60 millions for sure."

DreamWorks' critically acclaimed R rated drama "American Beauty" continued to widen in its fourth weekend, sliding one peg to fourth place with a still impressive ESTIMATED $9.20 million (+13%) at 1,226 theatres (+520 theatres; $7,504 per theatre). Its cume is approximately $30.8 million.

"Beauty's" per theatre average was the highest for any film playing in wide release last weekend.

Directed by Sam Mendes, it stars Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, Thora Birch, Wes Bentley, Mena Suvari, Peter Gallagher, Allison Janney and Chris Cooper.

"We're in most markets now," Dream Works distribution head Jim Tharp said Sunday morning. "We're not as wide as you would be if you were on a 2,000 plus run break. But, obviously, with the average of $7,500, we're still pleased with the grosses. We're probably only going to add a few runs this week. We want to maintain the strength in each of the markets that we currently have."

Now that "Beauty" is playing wider, what are its demographics? "It's actually skewing a little younger than when we first started," Tharp replied. "It's about 50-50 over-30 and under-30. When we first started, it was more like 60-40 (favoring) the over-30 category. Females are still a little over 50%."

Paramount's opening of its PG-13 youth appeal comedy "Superstar" was fifth with a super ESTIMATED $9.00 million at 1,943 theatres ($4,632 per theatre).

Directed by Bruce McCulloch, it stars Molly Shannon and Will Ferrell.

"It's pretty much what we expected," Paramount distribution president Wayne Lewellen said Sunday morning. "'A Night at the Roxbury' did $9.6 million (when it opened last Oct. 2-4) with a little broader audience (of) young males and with the music."

The core audience for "Superstar," Lewellen added, "is younger females."

Buena Vista/Hollywood and Spyglass Entertainment's PG-13 rated thriller "The Sixth Sense" held on to sixth place in its 10th weekend, still showing terrific legs with an ESTIMATED $6.10 million (-12%) at 2,784 theatres (-37 theatres; $2,211 per theatre). Its cume is approximately $242.7 million, heading for $260 million in domestic theatres.

Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, it stars Bruce Willis.

Key films -- those doing at least $500,000 for the weekend -- grossed approximately $81.29 million, up approximately 20.21% from Weekend 41 last year when key films took in $67.62 million. 

Independent filmmaker David O. Russell seemed to have disappeared after making the art-house hits ''Spanking the Monkey'' (1994), a dark comedy about a college boy's taboo interlude with his mother, and ''Flirting with Disaster'' (1996), a farce in which new father Ben Stiller sets off in search of his birth parents.

After those intimate dissections of family trauma, Russell has resurfaced with a large-canvas movie about the mother of all contemporary wars. Russell challenges assumptions about the Persian Gulf War and its legacy with ''Three Kings,'' an unconventional riff on action-movie conventions.

The movie stars George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube, and Spike Jonze as American soldiers who follow a confiscated map's directions to a stash of pilfered Kuwaiti gold bullion in an Iraqi bunker. In the confusion of the war's end, in March 1991, the gang makes a beeline for the loot. They wind up getting an unexpected education about how the Iraqi people got shafted by a war that was fought to defend Kuwaiti oil interests.

 ''To me, the end of the war was more interesting than the war itself,'' says Russell. ''It was this weird limbo. For the American soldiers it was like, `What exactly is happening? It's peace, but Saddam is still here, and he's crushing this democracy movement that's, like, 100 yards away from us. But we're partying like corn-fed American frat boys.'

 ''I thought, this is such amazing drama and comedy. Partying right next to an insurrection.''

 The jumping-off point for ''Three Kings'' was a script owned by Warner Bros., which had invited Russell to make a movie after ''Flirting with Disaster.'' Russell retained its premise and wrote the screenplay over an 18-month period.

While immersed in research, Russell considered sneaking into Iraq to take pictures. ''I met this Kuwaiti businessman on Martha's Vineyard who was going to take me there, through Kuwait. But right about that time, our weapons inspectors were kicked out and we were threatening to bomb them. I decided maybe it's not a good time to go.''

Russell's trip to Boston to talk about ''Three Kings'' is a sort of homecoming. The New York native and Amherst College graduate began his film career here in the 1980s. The pursuit grew out of years of political activity in Maine and Boston, working on housing issues and teaching literacy. To document the story of a Central American immigrant, Russell borrowed film equipment from Bunker Hill Community College. He then moved to Washington, D.C., to work on the PBS show
 ''Smithsonian World.''

Another '80s experience directly fueled ''Three Kings.'' Russell joined an education project in Nicaragua ''because they had a revolution there, and I was excited by that. This was around the time that the contra war was starting up.

''Everybody had guns. You'd be drinking a beer with somebody and hear guns go off. It would be because a guy ran a stop sign. Everything was out of balance in the political chaos. Then you'd go back to drinking beer and watching a baseball game.

 ''That environment was in me until I made this movie. I really wanted to use it.''

 Stimulating research

 Russell's creative juices, as well as his political instincts, were stimulated by his research. Photos in a Los Angeles Times book chronicling the Gulf War showed Iraq's ''big, white, flat landscape that puts everything in odd, existential relief, like in an Antonioni movie.'' He saw the surreal potential in placing ''these healthy Americans with their neon-colored footballs and a Bart Simpson doll on the grill of a Humvee together with this life-or-death situation that was going on for democracy.''

 Russell's cinematic inspirations for ''Three Kings'' were Robert Altman's ''M*A*S*H'' and Russian director Mikhail Kalatozov's 1964 experimental documentary ''I Am Cuba.'' The latter ''was a real film education for me, in terms of using the camera in a journalistic, kinetic way.''

 Through stylized cinematography in which different movements of the story are depicted in alternately acidic and silky hues, Russell intended ''to pull you down the rabbit hole, to destabilize your sense of comfort.''

 Nevertheless, Russell insisted on realism when it came to Iraqi language, customs, and religious practices. Among the advisers to the production were Muslim leaders and an Iraqi filmmaker who now lives in Detroit.

 The contingent of American military consultants was led by the late Sergeant Major Jim Parker, some of whose experiences were channeled into George Clooney's character of Special Forces captain Archie Gates. ''Parker came from an area in Ohio very close to where George is from in Kentucky. They hit it off. That's what's cool about George. He can play a glamorous, romantic lead, but he has that down-home, regular-guy Kentucky thing in him. Which I didn't think had yet been played at its most intense and its most vulnerable.''

 Actually, rapper-actor-director Ice Cube was the first actor sought by Russell. He plays Staff Sergeant Chief Elgin, devout Christian and man of few words. ''Cube has that quiet intensity and strength in his presence,'' says Russell. ''That's exactly what the character is all about.''

 Respect for Wahlberg

 For the role of young blood Sergeant Troy Barlow, a married reservist with a newborn daughter, Russell cast Mark Wahlberg. ''I respect Mark enormously. His ambitions are on a par with De Niro's, which may make some people laugh, but I don't think they'll laugh for long.''

 Musing about the particulars of directing the Dorchester rapper turned movie star, Russell says, ''Mark has to trust you. I hung out with him and his friends from Boston. His friend Donkey showed up on our set, right out of jail, asked if he could take the VCR out of Mark's trailer. Mark's like, `No, you cannot take the VCR from my trailer.' They're good guys, they're sweethearts, and he gives them jobs.''

 Russell wrote the role of Private Conrad Vig, Troy's redneck acolyte, for his friend Spike Jonze, the inventive music-video director whose feature ''Being John Malkovich'' will soon enter our cosmos. He also welcomed aboard the French-Moroccan actor Said Taghmaoui (''Hate''). The actor plays a slang-spouting Iraqi interrogator who tortures Troy but who, because his son has been killed and his wife wounded due to American bombing, elicits Troy's empathy.

 Taghmaoui brought continental street credibility to the set. ''I asked him what part of Paris he was from. He said, `David, I am from the Compton of Paris.' I said, `Wow, did you tell Cube that?' He said, `I don't have to tell him. He knows from my face. Just like I know from your face that you are bourgeois.''' Russell, straight out of Larchmont, grins.

 He tightens, however, when asked about a fight on set between him and Clooney, an incident recounted (by a crew member) in the cover story on Clooney in Esquire. But Russell fields the question unhesitatingly: ''We had a charged argument during the filming of the climax. And it was great, because after that eruption, there was tremendous energy in the scene.''

 For the risk-taking indie director, the tumble into the Hollywood rabbit hole has been an invigorating, rather than a mind-blowing, experience.

 ''I'm feeling more confident as a filmmaker,'' Russell affirms. ''I think I'm just getting to the good stuff.''

Our script begins in Hollywood. The land of dreams? Or is it the factory where dreams are pitched, packaged, produced, promoted and finally projected? This is a company town. A place where people suspend disbelief for a living. Luxury imports fill the parking lot. Cell phones ring off the hip. Blond Baywatch babes bounce around in packs. The whole scene resembles one big studio back lot.

Act I. Enter Mark Wahlberg, 28, Boston native and hot young star of the new movie Three Kings. In many ways, he is a  rarity in Hollywood -- someone more concerned with posterity than big box office. He seems at the crux of an unpredictable career that is once again headed upward.

Cut to a sidewalk table of a fashionable restaurant at the foot of the Hollywood Hills. Wahlberg sips merlot. The wardrobe is casual: shorts, sneakers. He's tan and handsome, with a short scruffy beard, cash-green eyes and a playful sense of humor. "Doin' this new movie, I gotta get that Bahston accent back, so I'm tahkin' like this, and it [expletive] socks, y'know?" He  laughs. "It took me too long to shake it."

Even with the accent, Wahlberg sounds different. For one thing, he's not so quick to pull up his sleeve and show off the battle scars. "That was my biggest problem when I started acting," he says. "Trying to show everybody how hard I was." He's talkative, disarming, polite. Three extras approach. One tells our star he's going to "love this film" he's developing and slides him a script. "That's L.A.," cracks Wahlberg, apologizing. "People tell me we're doing a movie together, something I never even heard of before." He smiles. "I just 'yes' 'em to death: 'Ohhh, I love the script.' "

Wahlberg wasn't always in such demand. His breakthrough role was the hot-tempered, drug-addled dropout opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in 1995's The Basketball Diaries. Then came Fear and an MTV Movie Award nomination, then Boogie Nights, in which he delivered an Oscar-caliber turn as insolent porn star Dirk Diggler. Overnight, Wahlberg became Hollywood's face of tomorrow. His career took off.

Roll picture. Three Kings is a wild collision of action, humor and drama, starring George Clooney, Ice Cube and Wahlberg as American soldiers determined to jack millions in Kuwaiti gold during the Gulf War. Wahlberg turns in another deep-felt performance, this time as a homesick family man tortured by Iraqis. It's the type of film that isn't afraid to criticize foreign policy or ponder a question that has perplexed millions: "What is wrong with Michael Jackson?"

Act II. Begin flashback: The youngest of nine, Wahlberg is raised on the streets of Boston's Dorchester neighborhood. It is straight ghetto, the kind of place where, on payday, teenagers wait outside pubs to knuckle down grown men. By 16, he's hustling drugs, stealing cars, anything for street credibility. Then in 1988, the same year Matt Damon enters Harvard, Wahlberg is convicted of assault. He serves 45 days of a two-year sentence. "After getting out of jail, I saw the guys I thought I looked up to and knew it wasn't for me anymore," he says. "I wanted to do right."

Cue music. With the help of his brother Donnie, who'd hit it big with the teenybopper band New Kids on the Block, Wahlberg records a hip-hop album. His raps are mostly feel-good stuff -- just the type of music needed in the early '90s to bring hip-hop into the mainstream. Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch's debut album goes platinum.

Fame from rap leads to a lucrative modeling career, which makes him better known for his rippling physique than for his body of work. He signs a contract with Calvin Klein. A gigantic billboard looms over Times Square: Wahlberg in his underwear. Suddenly he's living like a rock star, blowing his entire Calvin Klein check ($100,000) on a Mercedes, renting jets, getting into public brawls. "I finally woke up and realized I was heading down the wrong path," he now says of the whole experience. "There were exciting moments. I found out my record was No. 1. It happened fast, but it ended fast, too."

Act III opens as a Boeing 747 touches down at LAX. The year 1993 flashes across the screen. From the start, Wahlberg decides against capitalizing on his image as a hip-hop pinup. He's interested in building a formidable acting career; that means dropping the energetic exhibitionist shtick Marky Mark personified. This doesn't prove easy. The offers: white rapper in Sister Act 2, thug in Rollerblading picture. "People were coming at me for all the wrong reasons," he says. "I didn't want movie audiences thinking they were going to see Marky Mark. I wanted to start over."

All his hard work is being rewarded. After a relatively slow start, he's now made four films in a row. "I didn't think I'd be in the position I'm in just yet," he says, dumbfounded. "I have the opportunity to do anything out there. I've been able to show what I can do as an actor, and the filmmakers I want to work with are taking notice."

One reason for his success is his range. He evokes several emotions at once: strength, sensitivity, naiveté, anger. You believe him as a Southern con man, his role in Traveller, or as a soft-spoken assassin in The Big Hit. "Mark is every bit as serious as Robert De Niro in his acting ambitions," says Three Kings director David Russell. "He's willing to do anything. He brings an odd combination of street toughness and vulnerability, which I think is his particular gift."

Right now, he's filming The Perfect Storm along the coast of Massachusetts. Based on the best seller, it deals with true accounts of courageous rescue operations at sea. The movie is expected to be one of next summer's blockbusters. It's also liable to catapult Wahlberg into the upper echelons of Hollywood stardom, a prospect he's not altogether comfortable with.

"I don't want the pressures of being a movie star," he says. "If I can continue to grow and play interesting, challenging roles, that's enough." The important thing is "to take that next step, to go a little bit further." Moving on to bigger but not necessarily better pastures, he says, isn't always a good idea. Too many talented actors have been seduced and subsumed by the Hollywood payday. It takes discipline, willpower -- strong willpower. "I've been tempted," Wahlberg admits with a boyish grin. "The money, yknowhaImean? They start waving lots of money and I'm thinking, 'Hey, this can all end tomorrow. They might tell me it was all a big lie, and I gotta go home.' "

Not likely. Hey, this is Hollywood. It's going to be a happy ending.

Craigh Barboza was "bohn" in New Bedford, Mass. He now lives in Brooklyn. 

"Are we shooting?" calls a boyish American soldier (Mark Wahlberg) to distant buddies at the start of Three Kings. He stands in a flat, whitish Iraqi desert dotted with mounds. On top of one, far away, an Iraqi waves a rifle and some kind of cloth. Is he taunting the American? Appealing to him? Is he surrendering or on the verge of opening fire? Hard to tell: The light is too glaring; the man's frantic gestures too alien. A title has informed us that it's 1991, that the cease-fire with Iraq has just become official. "Are we still shooting people or what?" the soldier calls again. In the absence of a clear answer--of a clear anything--he raises his rifle and shoots. The soldiers reach the Iraqi as he's hemorrhaging, a look of wonder in his dying eyes. "You shot yourself a raghead!" whoops one, but the American who fired--identified by an on-screen title as U.S. Army Sgt. Troy Barlow--recoils from his handiwork. The war is over and Barlow has just killed his first man.

That scene is like a mini Beckett farce with a cruel jet of gore for a punch line. Barlow is shooting at people he doesn't know and can barely see for reasons that are never apparent in a place that's as foreign as the surface of the moon. All that's finally real is the blood. From this brilliant overture, it's obvious that the writer-director, David O. Russell, wants to break down your defenses against cinema's violent imagery: He's juxtaposing farce and atrocity in ways that few American
directors have dared. And he's not stinting on the carnage, either. The movie's most talked-about close-up shows the track of a bullet as it enters a body, plowing its way through tissue and into a liver, which releases blackish bile. (Reportedly, Russell had bullets fired into a cadaver.) No wound, the director is saying (screaming, in effect), should ever be taken for granted.

It helps that Russell is fueled by genuine outrage at that most jumbled and arm's length of wars: the one that pretended to be about the "liberation of the people of Kuwait"; the one that ended up (once the oil wells were recaptured) rebounding on Iraqis who'd been convinced by President Bush to take up arms against Saddam Hussein. As the protagonist, Special Forces Capt. Archie Gates (a hard, brooding George Clooney) declares in his first scene, "I don't even know what we did here." Cynical and disgusted, Gates gets wind (so to speak) of a wild discovery: a map lodged in the rear end of an Iraqi prisoner that shows what appear to be bunkers holding loot plundered from Kuwait. Announcing that he has no moral   problem stealing from Saddam what Saddam has stolen from the sheiks, he joins with Barlow, Barlow's buddy Vig (skinny Spike Jonze, director of the upcoming Being John Malkovich), a game but witless redneck, and the resourceful Chief (Ice Cube) in search of the motherlode. Millions of dollars worth of gold bullion, Gates says, can be loaded into their Humvee without firing a shot, and they'll be back at camp before lunch.

At this juncture, Three Kings seems poised to turn into a relatively straightforward genre piece--a perverse "caper" movie with a touch of Gunga Din (1939). But the surreal setting hints at dissonances, disturbing incongruities. The white light scorches every surface--it seems to be eating into people. Details of the natural world are bleached out, but artificial colors--such as the pink and green footballs the soldiers pack with explosives and lob from their speeding vehicle for sport--leap out of the screen like radioactive Christmas baubles. The action comes in jarring spasms. A cow is blown up during an exercise, and the Americans are showered with bloody chunks of beef--a harbinger of the insane slaughter to come. When Gates and company reach the village where the gold is supposed to be stashed, the Iraqi people think they're being liberated and rejoice, pushing their babies on the "United States of Freedom." They can't understand why the Americans aren't chasing away Saddam's soldiers, whose mission, in light of the cease-fire, has shifted from fighting the American-led alliance to ruthlessly suppressing all signs of Iraqi rebellion.

The weirdjuxtapositions in these scenes are the movie's soul. Inside a bunker, a soldier uses a NordicTrack in front of a television just down the corridor from a torture chamber. Piles of cell phones, Cuisinarts, blue jeans, and gold watches sit side by side with weapons of mass destruction. The Iraqi soldiers turn machine guns on a truck that's heading for the village, riddling its driver with bullets. When it skids into a building and overturns it doesn't explode: Its tanks are full of milk for the starving people. Gates and his men have gone beyond the computer simulations and the TV cameras. As Russell has said, they've "fallen down a rabbit hole" into a place where nothing makes sense. It's the same twilight zone that Steven Spielberg attempted to capture in Saving Private Ryan (1998). But Ryan, set in World War II, ultimately lacked Three Kings' sense of moral chaos.

Three Kings lacks something, too, but only because its imagery is so ferociously original that Russell can't quite find a structure worthy of it. All at once, the movie becomes a "conversion" melodrama--the kind in which an amoral, Bogartish protagonist is unable to ignore injustice and so throws in his lot with the oppressed. It's a winning formula, but a formula all the same. Whereas the opening manages to be shocking and ironic at once, the picture's turning point is crudely manipulative. (Don't read this if you want to be surprised--but I do recommend you read this, because it's not a good surprise.) A wife leaves her little daughter and howls for Saddam's men to free her husband; a soldier pulls her away, holds a gun to her head and then, in full view of her spouse and child, blows her brains out; and the little girl throws herself on top of her mother shrieking, "Yuma! Yuma!" while the woman's blood gushes into the sand. This shocking act recalls the climax of Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969), in which a prisoner is executed with similar defiance, and Russell builds to the same wordless exchange among the protagonists: Those manly looks that say, "We're outnumbered and outgunned. We could leave now with our money. But if we do, we'll never be able to live as men again." But the victim in The Wild Bunch was morally compromised: He'd shot people himself for no good reason. And he didn't have a wide-eyed little girl bearing witness to his murder.

No doubt Russell would justify the starkness of the mother's killing by saying you can't make a movie about the obscenity of violence without showing something so obscene that it scalds us. I don't quarrel with his intentions. But after that sequence, a part of me shut down. Where do you go from something like that? To more horrible killings? To more absurdist comedy? The climax--in which Gates and the others decide to escort a horde of noble Iraqis (men, women, children, the elderly) to the border and are predictably converged upon by Saddam's men, unfriendly American troops, and a CNN reporter (Nora Dunn)--isn't bad; it just feels cheap compared to what has preceded it. In Time, Richard Schickel calls the genre structure a pretext for a "surreal essay" on the Gulf War, and he might be right. And it's also true  that a studio such as Warner Bros. would never have spent $50 million on a film that didn't have a conventionally rabble-rousing outline and an upbeat finish. But I think those conventions diminish the movie. If I'm holding Russell to the highest standards imaginable, it's only because his vision is that powerful.

It's also possible that Russell is too sadistic by temperament to make a fully convincing anti-war film. He's out to blast us. He wants to punish the characters--and the audience--for their ignorance. At the time of the Gulf War, a study showed that a majority of heavy CNN viewers (people who watched seven hours a day) who supported the action believed that Kuwait was a democracy, and the soldiers here are portrayed in a similar state of gung-ho naiveté. One of the film's most outlandish (and effective) scenes is the torture of Barlow by an Iraqi officer (Saïd Taghmaoui) who wants to "educate" him. The session begins with a bizarre dialogue about Michael Jackson--an African-American superstar who in the Iraqi officer's view was driven by bigotry to whiten his face and straighten his hair--and winds up with the Iraqi pouring oil down Barlow's throat in a brutal effort to drive home the war's real aim.

We hate and fear the Iraqi, but when he tells Barlow that he lost his 1-year-old son to an American bomb, Russell cuts to a shot of the child in its crib as the ceiling caves in. When he asks how Barlow would feel if his wife and daughter were similarly killed, Russell cuts to a shot of the mother and child as the walls explode around them. The connections among enemy soldiers have rarely been made so palpable--or jocular. An Iraqi officer trying to escape from the smoke-filled bunker with a huge pile of blue jeans isn't so different from the Americans lugging bullion in Louis Vuitton bags. And both sides share a reverence for Infiniti convertibles and Rolexes. Three Kings is not the first anti-war movie in which opposing soldiers have recognized themselves in one another before pulling the trigger, but it might be the first to make the point in a way that has nothing to do with liberal humanism. The movie takes the view of a mordant social scientist who recognizes that consumerism has become the true world religion.

Russell's first two films, Spanking the Monkey (1994) and Flirting With Disaster (1996), were much smaller in scale, but both were products of the same angry sensibility. In the latter, the director used farce not to lighten the drama but to darken it, so that the slapstick debacles seemed to spring from the hero's roiling unconscious. In Three Kings, those debacles spring from the blind desires of nations--from the collective unconscious. A war movie that opens the instant the war has ended, Three Kings is among the most pitiless autopsies ever filmed.

NEW YORK-Mark Wahlberg made a big Hollywood splash as porn star Dirk Diggler in Boogie Nights. But in his latest role he traded in his G-string for an Army uniform.

Wahlberg portrays Sergeant Troy Barlow in Three Kings, which stars George Clooney and rapper Ice Cube. CBS News This Morning Mark McEwen reports.

Three Kings is an action-packed drama about three American servicemen who stir up a little postwar trouble.

"The war has been over for a week, and we're taking in a lot of Iraqi prisoners. And we've stripped them down and have run into an officer who did not want to comply," Wahlberg explains.

"So we had to make him strip, and there's a treasure map hanging out of his rear end," Wahlberg adds.

The film ends up resembling a treasure hunt of sorts where the characters are convinced they can find goods stolen from Kuwait.

"We go out there and we find all this stuff with no problem, but we also find out there's other stuff going on that doesn't sit well with us," Wahlberg says.

Three Kings is one of the first films to examine Operation Desert Storm. "It puts a face on the enemy," he says. In one scene, Wahlberg is tortured by an Iraqi soldier, who had been trained by Americans in interrogation and sabotage.

"It really opened my eyes to a lot of things that happened over there," Wahlberg says.

"My character is like most Americans, you know. We think we're the greatest country in the world, and we're doing the right thing. We do have great intentions but we don't always do things right," he says.

"I wasn't as aware about the revolution, and Bush convincing all these refugees to rise up and try to overthrow Saddam. And then turn around and walk away and leave them there to be slaughtered," he adds.

Wahlberg, who says he never expected to be an actor, is working on another movie with George Clooney Perfect Storm.

I was trying to be real and be the kid I was from the streets," says Wahlberg, adding that as a teen rapper, he was offered movie roles he was not interested in pursuing, such as a white rapper or a mean kid on the skateboard.

"Then I met Penny Marshall and Danny DeVito by accident. And they thought I could do it and gave me a shot," he says. "I don't want to do anything else," he adds.

Who's taking bets on the next actor to make a play for the White House? My money's on the artist formerly known as Marky Mark.

In the upcoming issue of Us magazine, Mark Wahlberg expresses his deep regard for the Oval Office's current occupant. "Clinton got his d--- sucked by an intern," he says admiringly. "Bill is thugged out, you know. Bill's O.G. -- original gangster."

Allowing that "the big part" of Clinton's dalliance "is wrong," Wahlberg says he nevertheless looks up to the president's slickness. "You've got to give him his props," he says. "He got away with everything but murder, you know. And it gives me hope. Maybe I have a future in politics."

Qualifications? Well, he's communicative ("I've been bulls---ting my way through life"), hard-working ("When I was selling drugs, I always kept a job"), and pious ("If I'm with my girlfriend and we made love and I have to pray, I feel guilty. The first thing I do is say, 'I'm sorry. I know we're not married and we shouldn't be having sex.'")

Sounds like a shoo-in.

HOLLYWOOD (Variety) - Warner Bros.' political actioner ''Three Kings'' went toe-to-toe with Paramount's thriller ''Double Jeopardy'' at the weekend box office. When the dust cleared, ``Jeopardy'' had the edge, leading the three-day period with a $17.2 million gross compared to the $16.3 million ''Kings'' crowned in its debut.

``Double Jeopardy,'' a cat-and-mouse yarn with female appeal, held well in its second weekend, dipping 23% for an estimated $17.2 million. The Ashley Judd-Tommy Lee Jones starrer came back with a $6,030 per-theater average at 2,884 jury boxes. The 10-day cume is $47.4 million.

The critically lauded ``Three Kings'' grossed in the mid-range of industry tracking with a solid $16.3 million launch. The saga of Desert Storm soldiers who become quasi-Robin Hoods laid siege to a $5,540 average from 2,942 bunkers. ''Kings'' had an OK 29% Friday to Saturday B.O. boost. Strong exit polls indicated that it was playing to an older-than-expected crowd. It should sustain against upcoming competition if the muscular tale can draw young males and attract female viewers.

DreamWorks added 277 theaters for its critical darling ''American Beauty'' and finished third with $8.1 million. The arch tale of contemporary suburban life saw a buoyant 36% boost, maintaining a solid $11,420 average from 709 rose beds. Though its strongest response continues to be urban and upscale, the picture is definitely gaining momentum in smaller centers; about 500
playdates will be added next weekend. Total is $18.3 million.

Columbia's ``Blue Streak'' flagged 36% to finish fourth with $8 million. The Martin Lawrence action comedy cruised to a $2,930 average at 2,734 raceways. It crossed the weekend wire with a $47.7 million haul.

Hollywood Pictures' ``The Sixth Sense'' remained sturdiest among holdovers with a 15% drop in fifth place and a $7.2 million span. The year's surprise blockbuster maintained a $2,550 average at 2,821 encounters. The total is a haunting $234.7 million.

Fox's teen comedy ``Driving Me Crazy'' maneuvered into sixth with a $6.4 million first lap. The romantic hijinx fared well but fell short of a cure for acne with a $3,200 average at 2,222 proms, but the low-budget picture is an easy recouper nonetheless.

Also premiering was Columbia's ``The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland,'' which grumbled up $3.3 million for slot eight. The furry Sesame Street fugitive emerged from 1,200 trash cans for a fair family average share of $2,730.

Hollywood Pictures' small town hockey opus ``Mystery, Alaska'' placed ninth with a reported $3.1 million. It flexed a flabby $1,850 average at 1,673 rinks.

Weekend business climbed to about $90 million, up 12% from last weekend but off 8% from the comparable 1998 weekend. Box office for the year rose to $5.63 billion, 7.5% ahead of last year's former record pace.

Last week's freshmen -- Columbia's ``Jakob the Liar'' and Touchstone's ``Mumford'' -- sank slightly more than 50% to $1 million and $900,000, respectively.

USA Films debuted its period adventure ``Plunkett and Macleane'' to a rather lively $240,000 with a limited wide 475 theater exposure. The larkish view of bygone highwaymen nabbed a sturdy $5,050 average.

Miramax's Sundance-acquired offbeat comedy ``Happy, Texas'' smiled with a $69,000 box office from eight venues, an $8,670 average. The company expanded its bittersweet romance ''Guinevere'' from 10 to 31 screens and saw its gross rise 87% to $102,000. Lions Gate's single Gotham screen release of cyberpunk picture ``New Rose Hotel'' occupied an estimated $6,000.

Also figuring in the top 10 was Universal's baseball romance ``For Love of the Game,'' with $3.4 million in position seven. Off 47% this weekend, the picture emerged from 2,933 dugouts with an $1,160 average. The total is $28.2 million.

MGM's ``Stigmata'' was 10th with $2.3 million. The religious chiller fell 51% for an $1,130 average at 2,045 cathedrals. It's grossed $44.2 million to date.

Remstar bowed Richard Attenborough's true life saga ``Grey Owl'' at 70 Canadian sites to $210,000. Pierce Brosnan stars as the 1930s Native American conservationist who was, in reality, an Englishman in buckskin. It averaged $3,000 and has yet to acquire U.S. distribution. 

Mark Wahlberg may have hit box-office gold with Three Kings, but the 28-year-old hunk admits he's squandered good fortune before.

As a boy Wahlberg prowled the hard streets of Boston's Dorchester 'hood. To make cred, the budding thug dealt drugs, stole cars and ran the gamut of inner-city delinquency. Then, at 16, while serving 45 days in prison for assault, "I saw the guys I looked up to and knew it wasn't for me anymore," Wahlberg tells USA Weekend.

What followed was a rap music/modeling career that overwhelmed the reformed street tough. "There were exciting moments," Wahlberg admits. "It happened fast." And Wahlberg played fast. He blew his Calvin Klein commission on a $100,000 Mercedes, pummeled press and fans, and repeatedly dropped his drawers on stage. "I finally woke up and realized I was heading down the wrong path."

So Wahlberg went to Hollywood... but Hollywood wasn't buying. "People were coming at me for all the wrong reasons," he says. "I didn't want 'Marky' Mark. I wanted to start over." Accordingly, he nixed some bum roles: rappin' in Sister Act II, a thug rollerblader. Finally, Boogie Nights brought acclaim.

Now "I have the opportunity to do anything," he confesses. "I've shown what I can do, and filmmakers are taking notice." Wahlberg, however, remains fearful of his past hubris. "I don't want the pressure. I've been tempted. The money. They start waving lots of money and I'm thinking, 'Hey, this can all end tomorrow. They might tell me it was a big lie, and I gotta go home.' "— Steven Kamman