Rules of Engagement (2000)

Rules of Engagement arrives from the year 2000 with a full complement of convictions that have since fallen out of fashion. William Friedkin directs a screenplay that passed through the hands of James Webb and Stephen Gaghan, and the result is a war picture that doubles as a courtroom picture and never once doubts the righteousness of the Marine Corps. A colonel orders his men to fire into a crowd outside the American embassy in Yemen. Eighty-three people die. The film's interest lies in whether the colonel's career survives, not in the crowd.

On the matter of social consciousness, the ledger is thin. Samuel L. Jackson carries the film as Colonel Terry Childers, a major studio war drama anchored by a Black actor, with Blair Underwood and Ben Kingsley in support. That casting is notable for its moment and entirely unremarked within the film; no character pauses to consider it, and the screenplay never treats race as a subject. Anne Archer appears as the ambassador's wife, a reluctant witness and domestic presence who exists to be interviewed in a kitchen. There is no engagement with sexuality, with the body as anything but a wound, with capital as a villain, or with the climate. The antagonist is a National Security Advisor with a videotape and a lighter, which is a political sin, not an economic one.

The sermonizing, such as it exists, concerns honor and command and the weight a man carries when he shouts an order that kills civilians. It is a hawkish sermon, delivered without apology. Critics at the time noted something stranger than propaganda: a fondness for Vietnam that felt borrowed from an earlier decade, as though the intervening thirty years had not occurred. The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee called it the most racist film ever made against Arabs by Hollywood. Friedkin disagreed. The court-martial concludes, the colonel retires honorably, and the film salutes. We are left to file it under period pieces, which is where such artifacts belong.