Rules of Engagement

by Jumana Farouky

According to Colonel Hayes Hodges, a recently retired Marine played by a well-weathered Tommy Lee Jones, the life expectancy of a soldier dropped into Vietnam's combat zone was 16 minutes. According to director William Friedkin, any man who survives those 16 minutes is granted a permanent license to kill. In this anticlimactic courtroom drama, Samuel L. Jackson is Colonel Terry Childers, a proud, stubborn Marine court-martialed for ordering the annihilation of 200 Arab civilians protesting outside the American embassy in Yemen. He asks Hodges, long-time friend and part-time lawyer, to represent him, and thus begins a trial brimming with loose ends and inflammatory stereotypes.