| 'Rules of Engagement': Fighting Chance By Stephen Hunter Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, April 7, 2000 | ||
| | |
 Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson star in "Rules of Engagement." (Paramount) |
But not surprising. Basically the film decodes into a cri de coeur from the United States Marine Corps; it seems a gyrene-pure scream "Don't tread on me, blankety-blank civilian."
Here are some of the fights it picks: with the left in general, with soft, career-concerned security liberals in particular, with those who aren't siblings in the brotherhood of battle who would nevertheless judge those who are, with those who don't listen to G. Gordon Liddy and do read The Washington [bleep], with holier-than-thou demonstrators who would spit on the uniform, with cowards, slackers, deviationists, nonabsolutists, and those who don't get this fundamental element of the Semper Fi creed: that every drop of Marine blood is sacred.
The movie, from an original story by the old Washington hand James Webb, who is an Annapolis grad, a highly decorated Vietnam vet, former secretary of the Navy turned best-selling novelist (the classic "Fields of Fire," among others), seems assembled from a meltdown of recent military fiascoes. It contains a body count that recalls the USS Vincennes' missile launch against an incoming plane that turned out to be a 747 full of Muslim pilgrims, and an intelligence breakdown that recalls the Marine aviators whose Intruder tail fin snipped a cable car wire in Italy, sending 16 skiers to their deaths.
According to Webb's scenario (the screenplay itself was written by Stephen Gaghan), a Marine fast-reaction team is choppered to the U.S. Embassy in Yemen, which is under ferocious siege by demonstrators. Commanded by an able 30-year veteran, Col. Terry Childers (Samuel L. Jackson), the men find the embassy under hostile fire, and the ambassador (Ben Kingsley) a sniveling, cowardly wreck, hiding under his desk while the flag is being used for target practice (it's his professional responsibility to secure it from such indignities). The ambassador and wife and child--and even that bullet-ripped flag--are evacuated, but then the Marines begin taking casualties; when three are KIA and several more hit, Col. Childers orders them to return fire, which they do with weapons set on full automatic. They kill 83 people, many of them women and children.
An enraged world, driven by an enraged media, demands justice for the baby killers. An administration of professional appeasers (no names, please) demands that Childers take the sole blame. Childers is court-martialed and put on trial for murder. He chooses as his attorney another colonel, Hayes Hodges (that supremely weary, wary old pro Tommy Lee Jones), who warns him up front that he's a weak lawyer and he'd be much better with "someone like Bob Bennett." But Childers knows that Hodges won't let him down; they shared the same mud and the same blood 30 years back, in a stink-hole glade in the 'Nam, where Childers saved Hodges' life, even if the act of mercy concealed an act of murder.
The director is another old, old pro: William Friedkin, who years ago directed "The Exorcist" and "The French Connection." He's great at the action stuff, particularly the way he uses sound to compensate for the budgetary limits placed on the film's production; his visions of battle in Vietnam and Yemen are quite convincing (Dale Dye, an ex-Marine officer who's made a career advising Hollywood films, was involved in the production and appears as a general officer).
But the film, ultimately, is about ideas, which are encrypted into the court case that takes up the majority of the running time, so that the film is sort of "A Few Good Men" retold from Jack Nicholson's point of view. The Marines would call it "A Few Good Men," too, but without the sniggering irony in the inflection.
The initially inept Hodges finds himself up against a noncombat hot-shot major (Guy Pearce, hiding his Aussie accent behind a New York one), and heavy hitters from the administration (represented by Bruce Greenwood as the national security adviser); key evidence of exoneration is destroyed. Witnesses are coerced into lying, or lie out of self-preservation. The machine clicks into fifth gear: You know the drill--spin, cover-up, selective leak.
Conservative politics aside, is it a brilliant courtroom drama? Not really. Does it ever reach the incendiary pitch of the mano a mano between Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson in "A Few Good Men"? Not even close. But it does do one bullheaded thing that took a great deal of Marine Corps guts: It speaks the "truth" that Nicholson's colonel didn't believe the rest of us could handle.
It's an icky, unpleasant belief. That melancholy truth: The Marines' job isn't just to die for their country. Sometimes it's to kill for their country.
The movie says: If you send men into battle expecting tidy, "surgical" responses, that's fine. But battle, particularly the kind of close-quarter urban mayhem in which the Marines must prevail, can't always be kept tidy and surgical. Things happen. Men die. Panic sets in. Pain and blood fog clear thinking. Us or Them becomes the organization of the universe. When the command to open fire is given, people will die tragically, many of them innocent. It's called collateral damage when the Air Force does it; it's called dead babies when the Marines do it. Live with it, the movie says, accept it; but if you haven't been there, don't you dare judge it.
Does "Rules of Engagement" play fair? Of course not. It's about as tilted to the right as the average Hollywood film is tilted to the left. Instead of stock villains like napalm sniffers and kill-crazed snipers, its stock villains are parodies of liberal excess: The Greenwood character, slick and ruthless, charming and manipulative, could be a stand-in for a certain president. The Kingsley character represents the secret conservative belief that liberalism is really a mask for physical cowardice, an oh-so-convenient way for men who cannot fight to argue that fighting is wrong and "never solves anything."
It probably doesn't even play fair in the technical sense. I'm not sure why men on a roof (as the Marines are) would be in so much danger from men on the ground (as the shooters in the crowd are). The advantage always lies with elevation. I'm not sure why the Marines don't have snipers, who could have neutralized armed opposition with that beloved surgical precision. I'm not sure why an after-action analysis of bullet impacts wouldn't have revealed the origin of ground-based fire.
It cheats. But it makes its case hard and it dares you to argue with it, rare enough these days.
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT (R, 127 minutes) Contains violence, obscenity and a creeping sense of deja viewed.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZMSxedKrrWidnqmys8DAoqWmnZ6pfK671aKcrGeimsOqsdasZqutnJrAsLLEp56an5Wisq%2FAx66lrZ2iY7W1uQ%3D%3D