Most of the time, at least since the end of the Korean War, first they fight the war and then they make the movies about the war. A bit of trivia...the only film on the Vietnam War to be released while the war was still ongoing was The Green Berets. Now that the Gulf War has been over for several years we see the latest movie about this conflict.

Three Kings from writer/director David O. Russell (Flirting with Disaster, Spank the Monkey) originally began as a script from the very talented John Ridley. The basic plot is that four U.S. soldiers still in the Gulf after the war has ended discover the possible location of a stash of gold bullion that Saddam Hussein had stolen from the people of Kuwait. They decide to liberate it for themselves. If this plot seems old and familiar, then you've probably seen Clint Eastwood in Kelly's Heroes when he was portraying a U.S. Army Officer during WWII who was trying to steal a bunch of gold bullion from the Nazis who had stolen it themselves.

Fortunately for its audience, Three Kings is superbly cast. George Clooney is perfect as Army Major Archie Gates, a Special Forces officer who is weeks away from retirement and sees himself as having nothing to lose by taking a shot at getting all that gold. Mark Wahlberg and Ice Cube are Army Reserve Sergeants who didn't see any action during the war, and are more than willing to journey into Iraq for the big bucks.

Their goals change when they encounter Iraqi Soldiers who have no problem with the U.S. soldiers stealing the gold, as long as they don't interfere with how the Iraqi troops are dealing with rebels who are attempting to rise up against the dictatorship of Hussein. It is here that Russell takes a turn towards political statement and fortunately, it doesn't detract too much from a decent action film about a war few of us really understand.

Russell wants us to understand the war and what happened after the war. We are left knowing that this was a war about oil and not about saving the Kuwaiti people from the aggression of Saddam Hussein. He makes excellent use of imagery to drive this point home.

But Three Kings also makes use of humor. The map that Wahlberg and his fellow reservists come across is hidden in the ass of a captured Iraqi soldier. Clooney is so busy getting laid with a good looking U.S. journalist that he's lost track of the other U.S. journalist he's supposed to be escorting and this gets him into trouble with a superior officer. The backstory and plot points that are there for laughs do score with maximum effect, but at the expense of slowing the main story's progress a bit.

There are technical errors that you can take issue with if you care to. There is little chance that a member of the elite Delta Force would be left shepherding a reporter around the Gulf, even if within weeks of retirement or in the official "doghouse" for some unspecified act. Delta is obsessed with secrecy on most levels. But I don't want to focus on this or the other technical errors involving the military. They aren't important. What matters is that much like Apocalypse Now, Russell's Three Kings makes the point that the rules that are made to govern war are as absurd as the concept of war itself.