I always get directors William Friedkin (The Exorcist) and John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate) mixed up.  They were both at the top of their game a few decades ago and spent most of the  ‘90s making first-rate but widely ignored television movies like 12 Angry Men and George Wallace.  Friedkin helmed The French Connection and Frankenheimer directed its sequel.  And six weeks after Frankenheimer’s mildly entertaining, big-budget bust Reindeer Games opened, Friedkin’s latest feature film hits the big screen.  And darned if Rules of Engagement isn't a mildly entertaining, big-budget bust as well.

Rules begins in 1968 Viet Nam, where young Marines Hayes Hodges (Tommy Lee Jones, Double Jeopardy) and Terry L. Childers (Samuel L. Jackson, Deep Blue Sea) slink through a booby-trapped jungle.  You may be wondering how fifty-three-year-old Jones and fifty-one-year-old Jackson were able to pull off young soldiers.  They don’t – Jackson wears a kerchief on his head, while Jones has a floppy hat pulled down over his face and blood smeared over the giant cracks in it like crimson spackle.  They could have dug up some younger look-a-likes.   Anyway, Hodges takes one in the knee and Childers saves his life.  The scene is filled with mud, water, bullets, red mist, gruesome wounds, and some very Saving Private Ryan-esque camera work, editing and film speed.

Flash to 1996, where Hodges is retiring from the Corps and Childers has just received orders to head up a special ops unit.  While he and his men are aboard the U.S.S. Wake Island in the Indian Ocean, Childers gets an assignment to rescue the U.S. Ambassador to Yemen (Ben Kingsley, What Planet Are You From?) and his family from the embassy, which is currently surrounded by hundreds of demonstrators that are growing more and more violent.  Childers and his crew fly three choppers to the embassy and rescue the Americans, despite drawing heavy fire from snipers on the roofs of nearby buildings.

When several of his men are killed in action, Childers orders his troops to open fire into the crowd of demonstrators, instead of just going after the snipers.  Eighty-three die and over a hundred more are seriously injured, including dozens of unarmed women and children.  The worldwide public outcry in the aftermath of this shooting is too deafening for the U.S. to ignore.  They need a scapegoat, immediately labeling Childers as “a hotheaded miscalculation,” and subject the Major to a court martial eight days later where he is charged with murder and other assorted atrocities.

The film is really quite good through this point, at which Childers hires Hodges to represent him, playing the “Gee, I did save your life” card.  Rules then becomes a run-of-the-mill courtroom bore with one of the most anti-climactic ending in recent memory.  Much of Childers' case revolves around a missing videotape of the incident captured on an embassy security camera that proves the demonstrators were firing on the Marines, not just the snipers.  In real life, they would have determined the origin of the gunfire from the holes in the front of the embassy, but the promise of detailed forensic analysis doesn't usually bring 'em out opening weekend.

There are a couple of bright spots in Rules, like some pretty nifty shots shown through the eyes of the sniper during the embassy siege, and a blistering, applause-inducing exchange on the stand between Childers and prosecutor Major Mark Biggs (Guy Pearce, Ravenous), who sports a wicked New Yawk accent (he’s Australian).  There are no opening credits, and the scenes set in Yemen (it’s actually Morocco) look quite lovely.  Another interesting aspect to Rules is that there really aren’t any bad guys.  Biggs is just doing his job (he refuses to seek the death penalty for Childers), and the National Security Advisor (Bruce Greenwood, Here on Earth) and the Ambassador are only after Childers to protect the interests of the country.

Rules was written by Stephen Gaghan (his first movie script), an executive story editor on The Practice.  The film co-stars Anne Archer (Clear & Present Danger), Blair Underwood (television’s soon-to-be-cancelled City of Angels), Philip Baker Hall (Magnolia) and Nicky Katt (Boiler Room).

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