Really, it's time to take the camera away from William Friedkin. He doesn't know how to use it in the modern marketplace. This film is a shambles. A Shambles! But it is saved, just barely, by the audacity of it's script's theme and the sheer acting will of it's two male leads.

Why does Friedkin need to be put on a leash? Well, for one thing, he can't frame pictures. The tops of heads are cut off so often in this film it gets annoying. Perhaps that was a projectionist's fault, you say? Perhaps it was, but there is a scene where star Tommy Lee Jones visits the Viet Nam War Memorial and the height of his body takes up the whole frame. His head is chopped off. You couldn't see a lot of ground below it. It was just a poorly framed image. Period.

Friedkin doesn't know how to tell a story either. He revisits scenes so often in flashback that we have to live them over again and again. Yes, it's a part of the script, I'm sure. But it gets annoying. Friedkin uses a steadicam throughout the entire film too, as in the aforementioned shot of Jones, so when his characters are walking in the woods and having a conversation, the camera is so jittery, you can't really pay attention to what's being said. The cameraman seems to constantly be struggling to frame the picture and losing at every turn. Now, I'm sure Friedkin's reasoning was this: These guys are Viet Nam vets. This flavors their whole lives. So the endless flashbacks are like the flashbacks that vets often have. The steadicam shots remind you of war movies, with their jittery cameras in battle scenes. These guys can't forget their past, their whole life is a battle, so of course it should be filmed in that manner. Poppycock. It doesn't work. It bugs the crud out of the audience.

And how bout those battle scenes? They are the most detestable battle scenes I've seen splayed across the silver screen in a long time. Friedkin insists on filming every single gunshot victim in slow-mo as they die. The squibs explode in slow-mo (it's revoltingly disgusting) and the soldiers fall down into the mud in slow-mo. It's glorifies war and makes it "cinematic." How repulsive is that?

And Friedkin also doesn't know how to do special effects or anything else that helps tell the story. He's lazy. The film starts in 1968 in Viet Nam with Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson in battle. How do they make Jones look 30 years younger? With prosthetics and make-up? Nope. They paint his face black for camouflage and make him wear his cap really, really low. It's hilarious. He still looks 60 years old. This is how you immediately know the film is going to be crap.

Still, Jones, and his costar Jackson, are powerhouses. They save the film. We expect nothing less of them. Jackson can be a bit irritatingly typical of himself at times but this is excusable in the realm of what he has to do here. It's impossible to knock Jones. He carries the film. Most of the rest of the cast does some good work too. Phillip Baker Hall, Blair Underwood, Anne Archer, Gordon Clapp, Bruce Greenwood, (the everchanging) Nicky Katt, Roma Maffia, and the others here all do fine jobs considering what they are given to work with. The worst part of the acting in the film however is watching Ben Kingsley and Guy Pearce stumble around their accents. It will bug the crap out of you. Why did Friedkin allow this to go on?

Like many modern films in the marketplace, the preview trailer for this film tells you everything you need to know about it's set-up. There is no reason to see the first hour of this film if you've seen the trailer. The exposition of the establishing story is excruciatingly long and cumbersome.

But the last hour of the film, the court martial trial sequences, are awesome. This is where it gets interesting. What we get, amazingly, is a film that asks us a simple question: How far are soldiers allowed to go to protect America? Okay, it's not so simple. "Rules of Engagement" asks a profound series of questions about the military, our government, our place in the modern world, and what we expect soldiers to do to protect and serve our country. It shows us the enormous task that they can sometimes undertake and it never, ever let's us believe that this is a simple procedure. We question our thoughts and beliefs quite deeply here because of the way the story is set up and of the way the trial plays out. We see that mistakes are made but wonder how we might have reacted under similar circumstances. We wonder what sort of discipline do these mistakes require, if any. We see how "Marine mentality" is an awesome asset in battle but a severe character flaw in the "real world." We question what we ask our military to do and then how we treat them when they do what we ask. There are no obvious bad guys here except in the periphery. It's a serious and thought provoking story that we are given in this respect.

To bad the storyteller is a doddering old fool.

Notes:

The film used over 800 actual Marines as extras in many scenes. (And I'm guessing for ADR work too).

In one shot, Jones is seen in an American Embassy where a picture of Vice President Al Gore is hanging on the wall behind him. Jones and Gore were roommates at college.

The film pretends to be based on a true story in it's end credits. It's not. It's based on a story by James Webb, former U.S. Secretary of the Navy. The script is by Stephen Gaghan.

Report Card Script: B- Acting: B+ Cinematography\Lighting: F Special Effects\Make Up: F Music: F Final Grade: C

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