Rules of Engagement

According to Colonel Hayes Hodges, a recently retired Marine played by a well-weathered Tommy Lee Jones, the life expectancy of a soldier dropped into Vietnam's combat zone was 16 minutes. According to director William Friedkin, any man who survives those 16 minutes is granted a permanent license to kill. In this anticlimactic courtroom drama, Samuel L. Jackson is Colonel Terry Childers, a proud, stubborn Marine court-martialed for ordering the annihilation of 200 Arab civilians protesting outside the American embassy in Yemen. He asks Hodges, long-time friend and part-time lawyer, to represent him, and thus begins a trial brimming with loose ends and inflammatory stereotypes.

Childers claims the crowd was firing at his men, but neither we nor his squadron see any evidence of this until a security tape is discovered revealing the entire crowd armed to the teeth -- the men point pistols, the women pull gun machines out from under their skirts, even a six-year-old girl is packing heat. It's a cheap, obvious trick that assumes the audience isn't intelligent enough to unfold a series of more subtle clues, and it plays right into the hands of Hollywood's overbearing Arab-as-terrorist motif that films like The Siege and Three Kings sought to destroy. The Jackson/Jones partnership has been a long time coming; it's a pity their first joint endeavor is swallowed whole by racist propaganda and blind American patriotism. At the Harbour Mall, Showcase, Starcase, Tri-Boro, and Woonsocket cinemas.
-- Jumana Farouky