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RULES OF ENGAGEMENT Send This Review to a Friend
Director William Friedkin returns with a crisp, crackling military courtroom drama that has its too-pat and contrived aspects, but nonetheless hold's one's interest, largely as a result of strong performances by Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson. When these men are on screen they dominate nearly everything else. Friedkin also tells the story vividly and economically, and that keeps the plot in tight focus.
The groundwork is laid dramatically at the outset when we see how a Marine unit copes with the threat of death in Vietnam combat. Jones as Colonel Hayes Hodges and Jackson as Colonel Terry Childers hang tough under enemy fire, with men dying all around them.
Childers saves wounded Hodges, and goes on to become a decorated hero while Jones becomes a Marine lawyer until his retirement. But everything goes wrong for Childers when more than a quarter century later he's assigned to lead a rescue mission to Yemen to spirit out the American ambassador (Ben Kingsley) and his family as the embassy is under attack by a demonstrating crowd of men, women and childeen, infiltrated by militants opening fire. When Marines have been shot and the battle intensifies, Childers orders his men to open fire on the crowd. "Waste the motherfuckers" are the words that come back to haunt him.
When scores of Yemenites are slaughtered and wounded, including women and children, it is a public relations disaster for the U.S. Someone has to be made the scapegoat. Childers is the one. It doesn't take a genius to know that Childers will ask his old buddy Hodges to defend him in a court martial and that Hodges will be up against a young hotshot Marine lawyer (Guy Pearce). Throw in suppressed evidence and perjured testimony and you get the David against Goliath picture.
There's a serious moral ambiguity to the film. The possibility that even under fire Childers should have found a course of action other than shooting at civilians even though they'd been infiltrated, is not sufficiently explored. The film hangs mainly on the unfair treatment of Childers. It works on that level, although the stuff about a former Vietnamese fighter being brought to testify and in the end saluting his former enemy comes across as hokum. "Rules of Engagement" was scripted by Stephen Gaghan, based on a story of James Webb, a former U.S. Secretary of the Navy. Friedkin does well by the material with which he is working and shows that he still knows how to grasp an audience's attention. A Paramount Pictures release.
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