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One of the fringe benefits of the end of the Cold War has been the cessation of those full-auto belt-fed "kill a commie for mommie" fantasies. Now and then a terrorist-inspired vengeance flick still turns up, usually starring Harrison Ford, but cinematic treatments of combat have generally taken a welcome thoughtful turn. From Braveheart to Saving Private Ryan to Courage Under Fire, filmmakers have recently been more inclined to explore the circumstances of warfare and the humanity of its participants than to exploit adrenaline cravings (for which purpose we now have better-quality video games -- guilty, thank you, I've got Doom and Quake loaded onto my desktop). But the ill-defined state of real-world warfare at the turn of the Millennium has proven to be a less approachable subject, more likely to turn up in independent films such as Welcome to Sarajevo. It's somewhat surprising then to see the issue broached by someone who was rightfully trendy in his heyday but has been consigned to relative obscurity in recent years, French Connection and The Exorcist director William Friedkin, whose last cinematic effort was the lurid 1996 Joe Eszterhas muddle Jade.
We first meet U.S. Marines Terry Childers (Jackson) and Hayes Hodges (Jones always gets a character name that's Southern but not quite as catchy as his own) during a 1968 Vietnam combat patrol. Hodges is wounded in a very Tarantino-looking ambush that kills everybody in his squad, leaving Childers to come to the rescue with some unconventional, off-the-book tactics, establishing a debt his friend will be called upon to repay in the future. Three decades hence, as now-Colonel Hodges is about to retire after nearly three decades of desk-bound military legal service dictated by the severity of his injuries, now-Colonel Childers leads an airborne team into Yemen, where fundamentalist-inspired violence necessitates evacuation of the American ambassador (Ben Kingsley) and his family. In what this time is a much less stylized, and more realistic, terrifying, sequence, Childers wades into a maelstrom that gets three of his men killed, prompting him, when he perceives fire coming from embassy demonstrators, to order his men to fire into the crowd. Seconds later, 83 are dead, including women, children, and elderly.
In the worldwide outcry that follows, court martial proceedings are brought against Childers, a much-decorated veteran of war on several continents. Videotape exists from an embassy security camera that might exonerate him, but a slimy National Security Advisor (Bruce Greenwood, who worked with Jones as an equally distasteful character, the not-murdered husband, in Double Jeopardy) conspires to make him a scapegoat despite poor advance intelligence that allowed the situation to get so tragically out of hand in the first place, and conceals the video evidence without even cursory examination. Which puts things in a less well-defined light -- due to the fog of battle, no one can back up Childers' version of events, including his second-in-command (Blair Underwood). Given the colonel's record of bending rules, we can't help wondering if he isn't willing to go to any extreme necessary, even killing unarmed civilians, to save his men.
Faced with a possible death penalty, he calls in the favor from Hodges, stating that, even though he could have a more accomplished attorney, he wants "somebody who's been shot at" to represent him. After half a lifetime of guilt, and failure to measure up to an illustrious career military father, however, Hodges isn't in the best mental shape either, and has to pull himself together before he can be of help to anyone else.
Jackson and Jones are always watchable whether or not they're given much worthwhile to say. Which is why it's such a shame that Rules of Engagement comes down to predictable, formulaic courtroom melodrama. Although the issue of modern warfare being "a whole new ballgame -- no friends, no enemies, no victory, no defeat, no front, no rear" is raised, it's never even marginally explored. At a time when recent headlines have declared that the implicit mission of U.S. troops in places like Bosnia is simply to stay alive, this film could have tried to present something more cogent than a couple buddies who at one point try to settle their differences John Wayne-style with a drunken brawl.
It is good to see Friedkin again. The footage shot on location, with Morocco doubling for Yemen, is especially effective, including both the combat scenes and a sequence where Hodges goes back to the embassy looking for evidence, encountering many of the wounded survivors of the incident. It's stuff that will look eerily familiar to anyone who remembers the desert flashback scenes from The Exorcist. But Rules of Engagement has to be considered a disappointment, worth catching only to fans of its headliners. C
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