**1/2 out of ****
Year: 2000. Starring Tommy Lee Jones, Samuel L. Jackson, Bruce Greenwood, Guy Pearce, Ben Kingsley, Anne Archer, Blair Underwood, Philip Baker Hall, Nicky Katt. Written by James Webb (story) and Stephen Gaghan (screenplay). Directed by William Friedkin. Rated R.
Have you ever seen a movie that, no matter how much you tried to wrap your head around it after leaving the theater, you just couldn't figure out what in the world it was trying to say? That you weren't sure if you liked or hated, merely because you had no idea what it was really about? Such was my reaction to "Rules of Engagement." As with most films, it has its good points and its bad points, but in this one, there isn't a clear dominance of one over the other. The bad points perfectly negate the good points, and it' s not just a question of dramatic effectiveness. The themes are contradictory too. Every time you think you have a handle on the movie's main "point," you think of something else that contradicts it. The result is a film that is tough to label as "bad," but is also far from being good.
Col. Hayes Hodges (Tommy Lee Jones) and Col. Terry Childers (Samuel L. Jackson) are old Marine buddies with a strong connection: Childers saved Hodges' life in Vietnam. Now old friends, Hodges is retiring from his career as a military lawyer and Childers is leading a mission to Yemen, where a crowd of protesters have begun a demonstration outside the American embassy. Upon arriving, Childers finds the crowd much more hostile than intelligence reports had indicated. After evacuating the ambassador (Ben Kingsley) and his family, Childers returns to find his troops under heavy fire. He gives them the order to fire into the crowd. Reports of the shooting reach American newspapers, and the military subsequently receives harsh criticism for what the public believes to be a breach of the Geneva convention, an illegal slaughter of innocent civilians. Looking for a scapegoat, the scheming National Security Advisor William Sokal (Bruce Greenwood) places the blame on Childers and plans to bring him up on charges of murder. Childers, eschewing an assigned defender, asks Hodges to be his counsel, despite the latter's assertion that he is a "poor lawyer."
"Rules of Engagement" is such a contradictory film that a review of it might be well served by merely listing the good and the bad. So that's exactly what I'm going to do.
The good: The cast has been very well assembled. Jones and Jackson are acting powerhouses, interesting by their mere presence. Guy Pearce does a decent (though strangely chosen) American accent, Bruce Greenwood is appropriately smarmy (apparently carrying over much of his smarm from "Double Jeopardy"), and there are good supporting jobs turned in by Ben Kingsley, Philip Baker Hall, and Nicky Katt. The bad: These characters are fairly clumsily sketched. The camaraderie between Jones and Jackson is indicated by a few contrived lines of dialogue ("Your only real problem, Hayes, is that you never lived up to your father.") and an unbelievably stupid fist fight scene. The supporting characters get even shorter shrift, with good actors like Kingsley and Blair Underwood wasted in superfluous subplots that only look like they're going somewhere. They're not. Anne Archer's part as the ambassador's wife is so useless, and her few token scenes so riddled with clumsy dialogue, that she comes off as a bad actress. Her attempt to breathe life into the character by hamming it up does not work.
The good: There are plenty of crackling scenes, most notably the early battle sequences, one in Vietnam and one in Yemen, that are filmed with a nice amount of whirlwind action. Director William Friedkin is clearly taking pages from both Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" here; his bob-and-weave camera technique and in-the-action sound recording create the feel of being in combat nicely. Likewise, some of the courtroom scenes, however cheesy they may be, are well-acted and filled with clever dialogue. It's not "A Few Good Men," but for a bunch of testosterone-fueled speechifying-lawyer stuff, it's pretty good. The bad: For every powerful scene, there's an equally dead one to accompany it. There is the aforementioned Jones-Jackson fist fight, and also any scene involving the ambassador's wife. Then there's virtually anything in between the opening battles and the courtroom business. Every time you think the film might start getting good, it pulls itself down again quickly, either by drawing scenes out longer than necessary (Jones spends far too much time in Yemen, considering how little it all ends up signifying) or by drawing attention to the stupidity of the characters (I still don't know why the N.S.A. didn't just release the hidden tape to the public, especially since it seems to exonerate the U.S. on all counts) or the multiple plot holes. (Why didn't Childers just fire at the snipers in the first place, anyway? The Marines had a tactical advantage over the demonstrators.)
But thin characters and plot holes can be forgiven if a film is genuinely entertaining, as "Rules of Engagement" often is, or if the film delivers some pointed social commentary. Unfortunately, this film also runs into problems with clarifying just what its message is supposed to be. Some reviewers have criticized it for having a right-wing bent. I can understand how one might see it that way -- the resolution seems to advance the rather suspect argument that "If you weren't there in combat, you're in no place to judge." If that's the case, why have military trials at all? Even so, if we' re supposed to consider "Rules of Engagement" a conservative film, what are we to make of the brief, but notable, scenes of Jackson's character losing his cool? We see that his firing into the crowd may have been understandable, but that he might have made a better decision by firing at the snipers. The film seems to reinforce the conservative argument by painting the Arab characters as liars or needlessly violent savages, but then what are we to think about the sequence in which Jones' character visits wounded children in a Yemeni hospital?
Too bad the film ultimately manages to render any debate about the ambiguity of war useless by painting its characters as obvious heroes and villains, giving us a thoroughly sappy ending (whose worst part is the ridiculous "final salute"), and leaving many pressing aspects of the issue unaccounted for. Perhaps one of the defense's strongest arguments, that Childers shouldn 't have been sent into such a hostile area without correct information, isn' t touched upon at all. And what may be the most pressing question of all seems to have been the most overlooked: Why was there a protest in the first place? "Rules of Engagement" isn't a bad film, but it's one that is often too dramatically and intellectually inert to warrant a full recommendation. I suppose "Rules" is entertaining in its own small way, but it's a very small way.
-reviewed by Shay Casey
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