If I were to describe the film RULES OF ENGAGEMENT in one word, it would be muddy. There's mud of every dimension in this film. There's plenty of physical mud, especially in the opening 30 minutes of combat, which feel rather like Saving Private Ryan, except it's set in Vietnam, and so drenched in mud. Immersed in the mud are two Marines, Terry Childers and Hays Hodges, played by Samuel L. Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones. During a nasty battle in Vietnam, Childers saves Hodges life.

Cut to the present, where Hodges is about to retire from the Marines. After the retirement celebration, Childers leaves for Yemen with orders to evacuate the Ambassador, his wife and child. But when he gets there, he finds a riot. Everything is suddenly muddy again--but not in a physical sense. There are people loudly chanting, there's sniper fire, and the Ambassador is in a desperate panic to get out. What happens next is deliberately muddy. Childers orders his Marines to fire into the crowd, killing 83 and wounding countless others. Back home, Childers in on trial for murder, and his friend Hodges is his lawyer. If the beginning of the film is Saving Private Ryan, it now becomes A Few Good Men. Leading the Prosecution is Australian Guy Pierce, who over-acts appallingly, and is so scrawny, it's hard to believe the Marines would recruit him in the first place.

For the most part, the courtroom scene follows the rules of the genre. The facts are deliberately muddy, forcing the audience to make judgements without all the evidence. It's the unintentional muddiness that kills this film. In part the muddiness comes from casting. Ben Kingsley and Anne Archer play the Ambassador and his wife, and you keep expecting that one or the other will have a big scene, and unravel the smoking gun that is ever present throughout. Then there is actual lack of clarity in legal terms. Even the verdict is unclear.

What is very clear is that Samuel L. Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones give brilliant performances. In fact, their performances are so compelling that they also cloud the movie. I was so engaged by their characters, I was lulled into enjoying the movie, and almost overlooked the most ridiculous scene in the middle of the movie where they engage in a fistfight for reasons unclear, other than really bad writing.

But in the end, Rules of Engagement left me wondering what the film is actually about. At face value it’s pro-Marine anti-bureaucracy propaganda. Certainly it reflects an attitude in post-modern society to question everything.