RULES OF ENGAGEMENT (Paramount) Starring: Tommy Lee Jones, Samuel L. Jackson, Guy Pearce, Bruce Greenwood, Blair Underwood, Philip Baker Hall, Anne Archer, Ben Kingsley. Screenplay: Stephen Gaghan. Producers: Richard D. Zanuck and Scott Rudin. Director: William Friedkin. MPAA Rating: R (profanity, combat violence, adult themes) Running Time: 128 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
I'm not sure which would be more depressing -- if the makers of RULES OF ENGAGEMENT were simply exploiting soldiers for a gung-ho patriotic courtroom drama, or if they actually believed they were doing justice to the complexities of warfare. The former would be a fairly typical case of Hollywood opportunism, a predictable but nonetheless annoying reduction of tangled moral issues to simple flag-waving absolutes. The latter would indicate good intentions gone horribly awry in the execution. You can figure out everything you need to know about how RULES OF ENGAGEMENT will approach its Marine characters from the tag line on the poster, set against a shot of Samuel L. Jackson carrying a young boy to safety: "A hero should never have to stand alone."
From the set-up, there's reason to hope for and expect something more. A prologue set in 1968 Vietnam introduces us to Marines Terry Childers (Samuel L. Jackson) and Hays Hodges (Tommy Lee Jones), brothers in arms connected for life when Childers helps save a wounded Hodges' life during battle. Flash forward 28 years, where both men are colonels, but Childers is a commander while Hodges is about to retire after three decades of military law desk work. But its Hodges' turn to come to Childers' rescue after a mission at the American embassy in Yemen goes sour, resulting in the deaths of 83 people including women and children. Though Childers insists he was responding to gunfire from the protesters, he faces a court-martial for murder when evidence suggests he ordered the attack on civilians without provocation. It's up to Hodges, as Childers' defense attorney, to save his career.
That's fertile ground to explore the split-second life-and-death decisions involved in combat, including the possibility that good soldiers can still make bad decisions based on emotional reaction. We see in the Vietnam prologue that Childers is capable of resorting to extreme acts under extreme circumstances, leading to reasonable questions about his mental state, and the mental state of any military commander. Did the gunfire to which Childers responded actually come from the jeering crowd below, instead of just from the rooftop snipers above? Is Childers a hot-head willing to commit murder to save his men? Are such means justified by the ends of saving the lives of fellow soldiers? Is there anything as black-and-white as the notion of a hero where warfare is concerned?
I refer you again to that tag line for the answer to the final question, and by extension every other question the film could have raised. For you see, there is no question about whether or not Childers responded appropriately; there's videotape evidence to prove that he did. There's also a nasty National Security Advisor (Bruce Greenwood) to hide and eventually destroy that videotape evidence, creating an easy villain when a much more interesting villain would have been the chaos of combat itself. The painfully drawn-out courtroom sequences might have been a place for exploring issues of how hair-splitting rules of engagement are interpreted when the bullets are flying. Instead, they're a place to conclude that Hodges is even a worse lawyer than he self-deprecatingly calls himself, since he never bothers to check the embassy building for the angle of entry of bullet holes.
Jones and Jackson are, of course, talented actors whose intensity makes it easier to watch everything they do. It's simply obvious from the first moments of RULES OF ENGAGEMENT that they're not playing characters. RULES OF ENGAGEMENT is about as thoroughly plot-driven as movies get, filled to its two hour-plus rim with action, exposition and testimony. It's too busy being a melodrama to worry about ambiguity or nuance of character, too busy appealing to viewers eager to root for Our Boys against the Bureaucracy. In fact, RULES OF ENGAGEMENT is so enamored with its own sense of doing justice to military men that it ends with the kind of postscript captions usually associated with fact-based films, just to let you know that those weasels in suits eventually got theirs. Heroes will never have to stand alone. Not as long as there are simple-minded crowd-pleasers like RULES OF ENGAGEMENT to stand up for the idea that heroes are always right.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 Semper Feh's: 4.
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