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Terry Childers (Samuel L. Jackson) and Hays Hodges (Tommy Lee Jones) have been friends since surviving Vietnam together. Cut to present day when Hodges, living out his career as a below-average military lawyer after being wounded in battle, is about to retire. Childers, in the meantime, is assigned to bail out an American Ambassador in the country of Yemen. It's never quite clear why there is such an uprising in the first place, but it leads to the film's most crucial and stunning sequence. The Marines chopper into the hot area where men, women, children and rooftop snipers all shoot bullets, throw rocks or firebombs at the embassy. Childers and his men, taking fire, manage to get the ambassador and his family out, but the heavy fire continues. We watch in agony as our Marines take hit after hit, some of them not surviving. We feel exactly how Childers feels (which Jackson pulls off using only his eyes) when he's had all he can stand and can't stand no more as he opens fire. This singular moment may be the only time in a motion picture when we approve of the slaughter of 83 anonymous people. But were they innocent victims?
This is the query at the heart of the trial. Did Childers give proper warning to the crowd before mowing them down - or does that really matter when the men under your command are being cut down? This leads to the questions of sanity and motives behind Jackson's character and the requisite courtroom showdowns and entrapments about missing evidence and outbursts nearly identical to the vengeful father Jackson played in A Time to Kill. But what Friedkin does so skillfully is almost trick you, the way a lawyer does, into feeling sorrow for the victims of the Yemen massacre only to pull the rug out from you back into reality after we see a different perspective of the "innocent" crowd.
Rules of Engagement is far from a perfect film. There's much to like and just as much to make you wince. It avoids the standard formula of many courtroom dramas by showing us the events chronologically instead of starting with the trial and flashback the events in question afterwards. Tommy Lee ("Where are those tapes?") Jones and Samuel L. (WASTE THE #@%*$!) Jackson both do terrific work here as the reluctant, alcoholic lawyer and the accused war hero. Ben Kingsley seems to get cut short as the rescued Ambassador and Bruce Greenwood gets to play T.L. Jones' nemesis again (as he just did in Double Jeopardy) as the cardboard politician. I never understood why his NSA character had to be so villainous other than the fact that the screenwriter felt there needed to be such a villain in the first place. If a videotape exists showing that Childers was right in his execution, then why should he worry what the Yemenese government thinks? If they question Childers' actions, he could make them copies and send it to them with a picture of a giant middle finger.

The snappy dialogue of A Few Good Men isn't here, nor does it fully follow through with the kind of military Catch-22 that was successfully argued films like that or even The Caine Mutiny. What it does accomplish is show that not all victims are innocent and offers a sympathetic view to the men we train to be killers, whom we should stop crucifying when their actions in the battlefield are justified. So what's left to see? More than you might expect.

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originally posted: 04/12/00 04:14:03
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