It seems these days that young Directors are out to impress critics and film buffs with "magic bag" visual spasms which they hope will get them lauded as the next Scorsese or Tarantino. Fresh from film-school these young film-makers plunge into their magic bags and heave at audiences a number of snappy visual tricks that they have been itching to get out. Take Paul Thomas Anderson for example, in his second feature Boogie Nights there almost wasn’t one scene in the movie when he wasn’t showing off a number of stylish camera angles and various visual trickery. Directly borrowing from Martin Scorsese and others Anderson made a film that was highly charged visually but had the attitude of an over zealous kid trying to impress you with all the tricks he can do on his bike. David Fincher’s third feature Fight Club is also an exciting film in the visual sense but much like Anderson’s Boogie Nights it’s unrestrained visual trickery did become a little pretentious. Now another young film-maker David O. Russel (Spanking The Monkey, Flirting With Disaster) is ready to show us with his newest film Three Kings that he’s seen a lot of movies and he too has a few visual tricks up his sleeve.

Russel’s new film is an action/comedy set during the gulf war. It takes place just when it appears the war is over with President Bush telling the Iraqi’s to rise above their leader Saddam Hussein. The film is mainly about four American soldiers who of all places to find it, discover a map inside an Iraqi’s bottom! which will lead them to the location of millions in Kuwaiti bullion. With this "ass map" in their possession these men sneak away from their troops and with greedy intentions set out to find the treasures. The men are Archie Gates (George Clooney) a hard bitten character, Troy Barlow (Mark Wahlberg) who wait for it...has a wife and kid waiting for him at home, Chief Elgin (Ice Cube) the token black character and the standard dumb ass hillbilly character (Spike Jonze). Together these men are determined to find the treasure and take it back.

Sort of like David Fincher’s Fight Club the film starts off well with plenty of amusing black comedy but after a while loses it’s edge. Fincher’s Fight Club lost it’s edge by becoming over-the-top and rather pretentious but Russel’s film loses it’s edge by becoming a bit moralistic, overly predictable and by losing it’s comic value somewhat.

Three Kings starts off with the notion that this could be a crazy comedy when the soldiers take the gold and don’t give a shit about anybody else. Unfortunately it becomes one those films where the main characters do the right thing and instead set out to return the gold to it’s rightful owners and help lead some Iraqi’s to safety. It’s also laced with that typical hint of American arrogance by painting most of the non American characters a little on the dim side and even subtle things like big brave American George Clooney leading Iraqi’s across the desert. It seems funny that Clooney’s character knows his way around the desert better than the people who live there, but hell it wouldn’t look very good having Arabs leading Clooney around would it? It’s nowhere near as offensive as the American arrogance in Armageddon but that arrogance is still there in all it’s glory.

One can clearly see that Russel would like his film to be considered in the realm of Kubrick’s war related black comedies Dr. Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket. His film has the similar tone and impact of those films for it’s first forty or so minutes but with it’s slightly moralistic second half complete with a dose of American arrogance it never quite attains the level of those Kubrick films. The extended epilogue is also certainly far from being Kubrickesque.

In a visual sense Three Kings is quite exciting with Director David O. Russel opening up his magic bag to provide us with a few inventive visuals. Russel’s method of handling the gun fight scenes in a bizarre shaky slow motion method is perhaps a tad more distracting than commendable; the way he decides to show us the inside of a stomach when it is hit by a bullet is an interesting an worthwhile piece of visual magic. In all Russel’s Direction is tidy but like a lot of young film-makers his need to impress does hinder the better parts of his work somewhat. The movie also benefits from Newton Thomas Sigel’s impressive bleached and grainy cinematography which makes things interesting and certainly takes full advantage of the sandy Iraqi scenery.

Quite surprisingly the performances from the four main actors are quite tidy. George Clooney who has never impressed me particularly much delivers a reasonable performance as the hard bitten Archie Gates, he’s far from brilliant but this performance does represent the closest to good acting he’s achieved so far. Best known for his solid performance as Dirk Diggler in Boogie Nights Mark Wahlberg notches up another convincing performance. In an over-the-top comic relief style performance Spike Jonze (Director of Being John Malkovich) is decent but quite annoying at times whereas Ice Cube is pretty wooden but still passable. My favourite performance belongs to Cliff Curtis (Once Were Warriors,What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted),the New Zealand actor delivers a rather convincing performance as a well rounded Arab character.

Three Kings despite not being a brilliant motion picture it is certainly a highly entertaining one. It possesses a fair amount of exciting gun fights, action and a good amount of loud booming explosions. When you mix this with the moments of black comedy and four decent performances you are at least given an exciting and enjoyable film to watch. It’s not at Kubrick level but as mainstream fare goes it’s above average.

3 STARS