It has been 25 years since David O. Russell’s Three Kings saw the inside of a cinema. Looking back from the other side of the USA’s “war on terror”, and it seems highly prescient in parts. In other aspects it seems hopelessly naïve. It is honestly a rather shambolic mess of a film. It wants to make its own impression, but at the same time it needs to toe a studio line. It tries to be cynical, but ultimately praises and deifies the very military actors its first half scathingly mocks. One can pick and choose their way through the film and find a lot to recommend – in the screenplay, the performances, the direction – but it means ignoring a lot of elements that simply do not work so well any more. It is a great film, but it is compromised.

In the immediate aftermath of the Gulf War, four US army soldiers come into possession of a hand-drawn map. It purportedly leads to stolen Kuwaiti gold, but instead leads to armed conflict, kidnap, fleeing enemies, and refugees.

There is a tension at the centre of Three Kings, that stretches between the film’s opening act and climax. It begins with a fiercely negative portrayal of the American forces that came to the Middle East to liberate Kuwait from the Iraqi military. Hyped up on the promise of being able to shoot enemies, legions of bored American soldiers are simply left to get drunk, play hijinks on one another, and commit the odd criminal offence. President George H.W. Bush had publicly encouraging Iraqis to rise up against dictator Saddam Hussein, but rather than back them up withdrew his troops and left them to near-certain death. In this bleak environment Major Archie Gates (George Clooney), Sergeant Troy Barlow (Mark Wahlberg), Staff Sergeant Chief Elgin (Ice Cube), and Private Conrad Vig (Spike Jonze) come across a hand-drawn map leading to stolen gold that has been hidden in Iraqi bunkers, and head into the field intent on a money heist.

Early scenes have something political to say, and they say it with scabrous humour and pointed commentary. Russell’s screenplay casts a wide net, addressing issues of class, politics, racism, and news media while simultaneously playing out as a genuinely funny action-comedy. The four leads are well-defined and well-performed, particularly Spike Jonze’s cheerfully  ignorant Private Vig. Nora Dunn also stands out, playing a career journalist squeezed out of her best opportunities by a combination of ageism and sexism.

Things go awry in the field, of course, leading to Barlow’s memorable interrogation by a rage-filled Iraqi officer (a sensational Saïd Taghmaoui). The scene shifts from the absurd (‘what is the problem with Michael Jackson’) to the pointed; to gain some leverage, Barlow argues both he and his captor are fathers. His interrogator points out that this is not strictly true: Barlow’s child is safely in American suburbia, while his is buried beneath the rubble of an American missile attack.

The film’s middle act effectively muddies the ethical waters for Gates and his team, but the climax reduces those issues to an easily-digestible mission of mercy to escort a group of Iraqi refugees to the Iranian border (a sequence featuring Hollywood’s go-to ethnic minority Cliff Curtis; shamefully underused). The cynicism of early scenes is entirely abandoned in favour of an audience-friendly embrace of American exceptionalism. After such a strong set-up, Russell’s final act has nothing available to do except disappoint.

Three Kings is well-shot, entertainingly performed, and almost a genuinely great movie. Sadly, and after an awful lot of flexing at the crowd, this fighter pulls its punches.