Rules of Engagement

I think this is a couple of choices away from being something really special, and I get the sense that the choices made were followed through on at the behest of test screening audiences. I know one of my issues was, and now that I've learned that, I suspect that at least some of the others might be as well. Still, what is there is surprisingly special. William Friedkin makes another courtroom drama, this time based on a script by Stephen Gaghan (originally developed by future Senator James Webb of all people), and the embrace of complexity and unknowingness makes obvious homage to Kurosawa's foundational Rashomon. This isn't at that level, but I think it could have gotten a bit closer had test audiences been able to accept flawed, incomplete answers.

Colonel Hayes Hodges (Tommy Lee Jones) is a desk jockey in the US Marines who is retiring after decades of loyal service which could have led to command instead of a largely unremarkable legal career in the Corps if a key event in his service during Vietnam had gone different. At the Battle of Calou, he and his fellow officer, future Colonel Terry Childers (Samuel L. Jackson), took their unit in opposite direction where Childers' half survived and Hodges' half was cut to pieces save for him, only saved by Childers taking illegal actions to get the captured North Vietnamese officer (Baoan Coleman) to call off the attack. This, of course, will come back later.

Childers is not retiring, though, and he's given command of a unit on a naval carrier in the Indian Ocean when he's called to a mission in Yemen to save the US Ambassador (Ben Kinglsey) and his family when a local protest starts to get violent. Getting the ambassador out without ordering a shot fired, three of his men fall as the chaos of combat overtakes him, and Childers orders firing directly into the crowd which stops everything.

This opening conflict in Yemen is really one of the key foundational elements of everything, and the fact that Friedkin films it so closely and almost incoherently at first feels like him just falling in with modern action filmmaking techniques alongside people like Michael Bay. However, he has a longer goal in mind: not letting the audience have a clear eye of the action because not having solid evidence of what actually happened is the point. It honestly took me a while to notice that effect, feeling like I had seen stuff that I'm pretty sure Friedkin didn't show in those moments, but it obviously helped form my impressions for what was to come.

Because what is to come is a dissection of Childers and the event with Hodges coming on as his lawyer in the court martial demanded by National Security Advisor Sokal (Bruce Greenwood) in order to try and avoid an international fallout in the Middle East from the images of dead bodies strewn across the Yemeni ground, put there by a US Marine colonel's orders. It doesn't matter if Childers was justified or not, politics demands that Childers be made an example of. The prosecution, Major Biggs (Guy Pearce), is an Ivy League educated lawyer who's never seen combat and is dedicated to taking down Childers.

Not having a really clear image of what happened in front of that embassy is key to how all of this plays out with Hodges going to Yemen to take pictures more than a week after while going over evidence an investigation picked up more than a day after the event. There are no conflicting points of view or flashbacks like in Rashomon, but it has a similar effect where we're supposed to not really know what happened exactly. Which test audiences apparently hated which necessitated the scene of Sokal watching a surveillance tape from the embassy that shows it definitively one particular way. Cut that.

The actual court martial takes up the final third of the film, and it's where Friedkin seems to be most at home. This is about actors working through meaty dialogue with heavy character implications as they jostle over the unknown of the specifics of what happened. Memory, falsified testimony, missing evidence, and documentation, much of which conflicts with each other, and it's supposed to be this unclear view of a complex situation...except that Friedkin gave into the test screening's demands and included the actual footage of the tape that one time. Really, everything else feels so heavily weighted towards one particular conclusion that it feels like the giving in for the tape footage was appealing to the lowest common denominator who wouldn't be interested in the movie to begin with.

As the movie ended, I was still on a very high note, though. I was largely ignoring the existence of the video tape footage and operating like it wasn't really a factor, but as time has gone on since the film ended, my favorability towards the ending waned. It wasn't just the final text which gives a nice bow to everything in a story that probably shouldn't have it, it's the reappearance of the NVA officer, giving testimony about Childers' war record (allowed since Hodges kept bringing it up), and how the NVA officer and Childers view each other one final time. It's going too far in a particular direction, one that seems to have the effect of absolving the military of any crime it ever commits rather than the respect gained over time that I think was the intention.

Anyway, if I had written this review immediately afterwards, I'd rate the film slightly higher. Writing it the morning after, I knock it down slightly. The ending is...off. The use of the video tape footage undermines a lot of the intention of what's going on.

However, outside of that, the rest of the movie is really, really good. The anchor of it all is the two key performances from Jones and Jackson with Jackson providing probably one of his best performances as a man who knows his life is on the line, putting himself in reserve, and needing to get pulled out to reveal the madness within. Jones tends to operate within his own small box of folksy seriousness occasionally punctuated by small guffaws of folksy charm, but he uses it well here as he gets into a situation that he feels is too much for his talents. The supporting cast is really good as well with special notice to Greenwood who is slimy as heck as the NSA and Kingsley who plays such a weak and spineless creature that it feels honestly quite different for him.

Friedkin had what could have been one of his best films of his career, but he (or his producers, I dunno) gave into the demands to make things cleaner in a story about messiness. I'd be interested in some sort of preview cut (a director's cut isn't happening now with Friedkin gone) to see if my issues with the film were there as well. But, it's mostly forgotten and ignored. There will never be any release of a preview cut (which would probably have incomplete audio mixing and a temp score at best), and all I have is the final product.

It's pretty good. I think it's earlier version would have been really good, maybe even great. But the final product is still pretty good.

Having just watched Rules Of Engagement, I have to say that although Samuel L. Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones are a joy to watch, I have to make some negative comments about this movie.

The movie is extremely manipulative, and comes from the equally manipulative director of The French Connection, William Friedkin. The movie's bad guys, oddly enough, are a crowd of irrational arabs, together with career politicians who won't just let military men do what they have to do.

The problem with the entire scenario is that the entire massacre could have been prevented with a couple of well aimed teargass grenades. Secondly, not a lot of time is spent on the character development of the 'bad guys', namely the Yemenis (in this case), who all seem to be very eager to die killing Americans, including their (the Yemeni's) toddlers. The later images of the little girl shooting a pistol is very manipulative indeed ("oh, see, she deserved to get her leg shot off after all!").

And thirdly, the incident most like it, namely the US Army Rangers debacle in Mogadishu, caused the death of 18 Rangers but 1000 Somali Mogadishuans, most of which were non-combatants. No-one seems to have been called to task for that event, let alone be thrown to the lions to appease public opinion, like Samuel Jackson's character is over a "mere" 83 deaths. (The same thing can be said for the invasion of Panama, where there was a similar death toll among civilians - the truth of the matter is that since WWII, conventional weapons have become infinitely more efficient, with the result that if conflict breaks out in built-up areas, _lots_ of civilians are killed.)

However, the one redeeming value (other than the acting) is that it shines a light on the changed nature of the political war that is required of the modern soldier in places like Somalia, Bosnia, etc., and that started in Vietnam.

Performances were good yet inconsequential. My biggest problem with the film was the (REALLY FLAT) ending, which tacked on "what happened to them" titles.

THE PROBLEM IS: THE STORY ISN'T TRUE.

What was the point of having "what happened to..." this character or that character if these characters weren't real to begin with? I went to check to see if the story was true (which would have made me forgive the lead balloon ending) but surprise, it was all made up!

Good performances give it one star, and the siege on the embassy WAS a well done action sequence, giving it another star.

There is an anti-American uprising in Yemen. Col. Terry Childers, played by Samuel L. Jackson, is sent to evacuate the U.S. embassy. Childers gives his Marines the order to fire back at hostile, armed civilians. This action results into a framed court martial. Defending Childers is Col. Hays Hodges, played by Tommy Lee Jones. Childers saved Hodges' life in Nam and the elder Marine lawyer feels obligated to return the good deed.

The scenes of engagement are very powerful and gruesome. Childers and Hodges have a knock down, drag out of a fist fight. The films climax kind of fizzles. The movie seems so potent up until the end. Don't underestimate a Marine's ethics or this movie. This is a winner, even if the plot seems so familiar.

William Friedkin directs and there is a decent supporting cast that includes Bruce Greenwood, Ben Kingsley and Ann Archer.

Headed by two unnerving performances, this film takes us on a journey through the gray area that is our military morality today. We live in a society insulated from realistic depictions of war. We get censored CNN and FOX news. We rarely get anything insightful, so it is a pleasure to have HOLLYWOOD offer up one of the most moving anti-military films in the past ten years. While the courtroom drama is by all means standard, the most unique attention is paid to the changing perception of TLJ's character. In his journy to defend, he comes to an all too real understanding of a culture whose leaders have no problem sending our boys to die, yet they themselves are either ignorant of the reality, or to politically motivated to be moved by it. In conclusion, this is an alienating film because it presents an alien culture that lives by its own moral code. That alien culture isn't middle eastern... it is our own military.

One more point; Watching this film post 911 gives it an all too creepy reality.