Of course, The Mummy fits most Americans' definition of entertainment a lot easier than Taste of Cherry. That's at least in part because The Mummy is Hollywood product, it's in English--and it has the promotion budget to carpet-bomb itself into the public consciousness. Thus American audiences stand a much better chance of seeing a movie in which Arabs are foul, smelly bit players than one in which their lives, jobs, and culture take center stage.

Seeing century-old ethnic stereotypes reinforced at the movies doesn't sound like a big deal. But it is, because we receive so much information about other cultures secondhand from movies--and that information ends up shaping everything from personal encounters to foreign policy. Ironically enough, that's among the themes of Three Kings, a crackling Gulf War satire that also happens to be a big-budget Hollywood action movie.

The antiheroes of Three Kings are four U.S. soldiers stationed in Iraq during the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm. Just before clearing out, Special Forces Capt. Archie Gates (George Clooney) hatches a scheme with three reservists--Barlow (Mark Wahlberg), Chief (Ice Cube), and Vig (Spike Jonze)--to break into one of Saddam Hussein's fortified stashes of stolen Kuwaiti bullion. They'll escape with tens of millions in gold, and the combat-starved Vig will finally see some action.

Action--the term is fitting for Vig's Rambo-esque video-game notion of warfare, which makes sense under the circumstances. As several characters observe, Desert Storm is "a media war," and anyone who remembers CNN's gripping POV shots of U.S. "smart bombs" destroying Iraqi targets won't dispute the claim. What Gates and his men learn when they leave the safety of their camp, though, is that the rest of the world is much more savvy about America than the soldiers are about the country they've invaded. And the previously faceless enemy, seen closer than a bomber's screen or a rifle sight, suddenly looks an awful lot like them: new businessmen, new fathers...new mourners.

This being an American action movie--and, we should add, a damn good one--the focus is more on the soldiers' path to redemption than on the displaced Iraqi civilians they aid in a desperate flight from the country. What's surprising is the movie's condemnation of American ignorance and arrogance in the Gulf War, including the abandonment of Shiite and Kurdish rebels who'd been encouraged to rise up against Saddam Hussein. The gold hunt turns the American soldiers into thieves and potential killers for money, and the movie has the guts to use their larky mission as a metaphor for the war itself.

The movie's gifted writer-director, David O. Russell, makes other analogies that are just as ballsy and astute. When Vig launches into a tirade about Arabs as "dune coons," Chief immediately bristles; it's a cutting reminder of how much unconscious racism underlies the war. As for the zipless violence that's an American cinema trademark, Russell has Gates give a gruesome lecture on what a bullet does to a human body, and he shows us: organs tearing in close-up, drowning in bile.