**/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Tommy Lee Jones, Samuel L. Jackson, Guy Pearce, Bruce Greenwood
screenplay by Steven Gaghan
directed by William Friedkin
by Bill Chambers In an absurd bit of pop irony, director William Friedkin's biggest smash post-The Exorcist is…The Exorcist. His 1973 horror masterpiece just returned theatres as you've never seen it before–meaning it has been radically altered to fit the George Lucas model of re-release. Starting from scratch today, I doubt Friedkin could have made something half as trenchant as even this tailored-to-the-Nineties version of The Exorcist; for all its unnecessary underscore and pandering CGI, the film retains a purity of emotion he's rarely pursued–or hit upon–since. With Rules of Engagement, which bows on DVD this month, Friedkin seems jazzed by a good cast and implosive subject matter, but at the end of the day I'd be hard-pressed to call it anything but hollow.
The Exorcist's preposterous particulars are handled with gritty realism from a skeptic's eye, marking the film as persuasive from start to finish, whereas Rules of Engagement, whose story of a military fiasco in the Middle East could have been ripped from the headlines, is too stylish for its own good. We believe it as much as we believe every other overcooked Hollywood production. Take the escalating theatricality of the courtroom scenes: by the time Colonel Terry Childers (Samuel L. Jackson) is ushered to the witness stand, the camera is practically on its side, and the lighting has turned incongruously chiaroscuro. We may as well have switched channels to High Noon, for there's no context for this shift beyond Friedkin's lack of faith in his own documentary roots.
Childers, on trial for opening fire on civilians during a demonstration at the American embassy in Yemen, has sought the lawyerly assistance of a comrade he saved, perhaps dubiously, in Vietnam, Hays Hodges (Tommy Lee Jones). What's at stake is whether the townspeople were in fact armed and firing at U.S. troops when Childers gave the order, an extremely difficult notion to confirm or deny, as all tape records of the incident have been incinerated by the weaselly head of National Security, Sokal (Bruce Greenwood). Meanwhile, Hodges has a crisis of conscience when he travels to Yemen and meets with suffering survivors of the incident, which leads to a knockdown, drag-out fight between the leads that releases tension but mainly serves to deflect from a morality play too complex and grim for the middlebrow audience the movie's courting.
Certainly, Rules of Engagement has stirring action and sturdy performances to recommend it, but it's disappointing to realize it will take the easy way out by scapegoating Sokal, and use Greenwood's recently but definitively established oily persona to sell some inscrutable, illogical character motivations. He's typecast, in other words, in a role that amalgamates the scum-sucking assholes he played on "The Larry Sanders Show" and in last year's Double Jeopardy. My heart sank during Greenwood's first scene with Jones, as it played all too much like a Double Jeopardy reunion; these days, Friedkin and Double Jeopardy director Bruce Beresford, whose name has become synonymous with rudimentary professionalism, are tragically interchangeable.
THE DVD
Technically, Rules of Engagement fulfills the potential of the DVD format. A sumptuous 16×9-enhanced, 2.35:1 widescreen transfer (the first time Friedkin has worked in this ratio) is darn near overshadowed by an excellent Dolby Digital 5.1 track. (The image is so detailed that Jones and Jackson, both of etched faces, fail to convince as young soldiers in 'Nam.) I cannot get past how good the Gary Rydstrom-supervised mix sounds in the war sequences–although we're not talking the level of aural artistry he applied to Saving Private Ryan, the disc should quickly gather a reputation for its outstanding sidewall imaging and sternum-rattling bass. Keep the volume a hair below reference level, or chance pulling a Marty McFly on your speaker set-up.
Rules of Engagement includes another of Friedkin's animated commentaries, thirteen minutes' worth of cast and crew interviews (under the heading "A Look Inside"), and a (strictly promotional) behind-the-scenes featurette (23 mins.). Friedkin begins his monologue by encouraging us to ignore what he says and extract our own meanings from the film, "because I might be wrong." But the remainder of the track is ultimately light on interpretation and long on the minutiae of getting a script to the screen, or filling in those gaps on the page (according to Friedkin, the lengthy opening battle was devised on a shot-by-shot basis–very impressive). In some ways, it's more endurable than the movie itself.
127 minutes; R; 2.35:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, English Dolby Surround, French Dolby Surround; CC; English subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Paramount
